Greenwich Word Time - sharing time and date made easy

Two words replace the hour, day, month and year stamp

Generate a pair of words, pass them on, save precious time

Share date and time using Greenwich Word Time (GWT)

1. Make your own time word pair:

Drag the slider below the words — 15 minutes per step.

2. Save this date and time to your device:

3. Decode a word pair:

Sunday, October 18, 2026 3:45 PM Europe/London 🙅‍♀️🥼 | attend.garage |

Note: when you use this tool, remember that its system has 1 January 2020 as year 0 and it is future proof until 15th August 2139. It is designed to cover present and future events up to mid-2139.

Why use Greenwich Word Time

• Convenience: a pair of words are easier to remember than a sequence of numbers and words
• Accuracy: information about a certain moment in time can be shared with minimal disruption
• Speed: it works both by sending a shareable link or by telling someone the two words that can be input on the site

Background

Greenwich Word Time is modelled on the mnemonic protocol BIP-39, first introduced more than a decade ago and used by the crypto community. Like BIP-39 it uses a fixed 2048-word English list, but ours is curated for this purpose: words are easy to type (each has a unique four-letter stem), and the handful of harsh or threatening words in the original list have been replaced with friendlier ones. The technology generates a pair of words to represent date and time, similarly to the way 'what3words.com' provides precise location.

The case for words in time-keeping

Long before clocks and eons before calendar apps, people used words to arrange a meeting. Sunrise, noon and sunset were the three main "time landmarks". Add to it moon phases and timings become pretty accurate, although they might give the impression of a generous allowance for late-comers.

Memory is a fickle instrument, it needs some anchor to be efficient. Time expressed in digits, with day and time adding up to quite a long sequence, is modern and fallible. One erroneous digit in the date or the hour is enough to ruin the day, isn't it?

Greenwich Word Time is compressing date and time information into a pair of words. It's easy to share as a link or the word pair itself and it's decoded in an instant, on the site. Give it a try, let us have your feedback in the form at the bottom of this page.

An extra detail: you will have noticed that the word pairs correspond to 15-minute intervals, as a nod to an old European tradition born in German universities. If the start of the course was announced at 10 o'clock, for instance, everyone knew that it actually started at 10.15. Several European countries use the expression 'the academic quarter' to signal the end of polite waiting time. Fifteen minutes is excusable lateness.