Zulu time

• ZULU time, zulu time

From the name for the letter Z in the ICAO spelling alphabet, a reference to the equivalent nautical time zone (GMT), which has been denoted by a Z since about 1950. See the list of military time zones.

Zulu time (uncountable)

1. (originally aviation or military) Coordinated Universal Time.

   Synonym: Z time

   • 2008, Carol Pollard, Reynaldo Anzaldua, Computer Forensics For Dummies, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 208:

     Aviation has long used Zulu time as the standard so that no matter which time zone you're in, you know what time it is.

   • 2009, Charles Stross, Wireless, Penguin, →ISBN:

     What everyone knows is that between zero three fifteen and twelve seconds and thirteen seconds Zulu time, on October second, ’sixty-two, all the clocks stopped, the satellites went away, the star map changed, nineteen airliners and forty-six ships in transit ended up in terminal trouble, and they found themselves transferred from a globe in the Milky Way galaxy to a disk which we figure is somewhere in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.

   • 2012, Jeff Van West, Kevin Lane-Cummings, Microsoft Flight Simulator X For Pilots: Real World Training, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 101:

     The aviation standard is Zulu time, which is essentially the same as Greenwich mean time (GMT) and Universal Time Coordinated (UTC).

• military time