Time zones list | Name & abbreviations

Although initially our world was divided into 24 standard time zones, there are much more of them. Due to a lot of geographical, social and political reasons they often deviate from the universal standards and recommendations which set by international institutions. That is why the list of time zones worldwide includes much more than 24 names and abbreviations.

Abbreviations for time zones

Names of the time zones are usually accompanied by time zone abbreviations and require decryptions. For convenience, we have combined them into one table. You can see the list of time zones by name below:

How many time zones are there in the world?

It is hard to give an exact number of time zones names. The traditional approach to classifying time zones involves the division of the earth by 24 of time zones. Most worldwide timezones really differ from each other by exactly one hour. By convention, their local time is calculated as an offset from UTC or GMT. At the same time, in many countries and cities, these offsets change twice a year due to the transition to daylight saving time (named summer time in some countries).

The exception of such an approach is those countries which also need to reflect inner processes within the regions. For example:

1. Some countries have colonial past. For this reason despite the fact that their territories are many miles from the control center, they use the same time zone while their time zones abbreviations and names are different.
2. Some countries have large territories, so that several time zones are used at once (like time zones in the United States of America, Russia and others) or the only one like in China.

As a result, there are many more than 24 time zones in the world. Every country may have a particular standard time zone with its specific name and abbreviation (time zone code).

What is the name of time zones needed for?

Different names and abbreviations are useful for identifying a particular country or location. For this reason, different time zone codes are used in different countries even if they belong to the same time zone.

Time zones list shows the diversity of their name and designations. Time zone abbreviation often consists of several letters, which mean:

• the name of country or location — first letters;
• standard/daylight saving/some else specific time;
• “t” — abbreviation for word “time”.

Anyway decoding of all abbreviations for time zones is listed above. For convenience, the list of timezones by country is sorted alphabetically.