When you search for “daylight saving time” on Google, you’ll find nearly 13 million results. “Daylight Savings Time”, on the other hand, brings about half as many results.
On the surface, it seems that “Daylight Saving Time” is the more popular of the two terms. Not so fast!
Take a look at the results from Google Trends, which measures actual searches and not just the number of search results that contain those searches:
Over the last 13 years, Google users overwhelmingly type in “Daylight Savings Time” instead of “Daylight Saving Time” when they’re searching.
Well, which is it? Which one is the correct one?
Let’s take a look at the difference between saving and savings, and maybe that will help.
Saving
Merriam-Webster defines saving as “preservation from danger or destruction” and “the act or an instance of economizing”. Oxford defines it as “an economy of or reduction in money, time, or another resource.”
Savings
On the other hand, both dictionaries define savings as specifically related to money:
- Merriam-Webster: The excess of income over consumption expenditures, often used in plural
- Oxford: The money one has saved, especially through a bank or official scheme.
So, saving is about economizing resources in general, and savings is about economizing money specifically. Daylight Savings Time would, therefore, have something to do with using time and daylight to save money; whereas Daylight Saving Time is about saving daylight.
The correct term is Daylight Saving Time.
Even so, technically, you don’t actually save daylight. You just shift where on the artificial timeline of the human clock that the period of daylight falls. but philosophical discussions are probably outside of the scope of this blog.