daylight saving time

noun

"daylight-saving-time" is a 18-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.

The verdict

“daylight saving time” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.

Unranked
below top-frequency English
20
letters

According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - The practice in some places of adjusting clocks forward in the spring and back in the fall, usually by one hour, so that the adjustment causes the time to coincide with the greatest period of illum...

Key facts for daylight saving time
PropertyValue
Headworddaylight saving time
LanguageEnglish
Part of speechNoun
Letters20
Misspellings tracked0
Confusable pairs0
SourceWiktionary (kaikki.org)

Where “daylight saving time” sits in English frequency

daylight saving time falls outside the top-100,000 ranked English words, the long-tail zone of technical, archaic, or low-frequency vocabulary, exactly where readers second-guess spellings most.

Beyond rank #100,000. Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list.

Rare enough to double-check

daylight saving time is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "The practice in some places of adjusting clocks forward in the spring and back in the fall, usually by one hour, so that the adjustment causes the time to coincide with the greatest period of illum...".

Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for daylight saving time, typically a sign the spelling maps closely to how the word sounds. This entry stands alone in our confusable dataset, since nothing in our dataset looks or sounds close enough to cause mix-ups.

No documented word history exists for this headword, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is daylight saving time, spelled D-A-Y-L-I-G-H-T- -S-A-V-I-N-G- -T-I-M-E.

Definition

  1. 1
    The practice in some places of adjusting clocks forward in the spring and back in the fall, usually by one hour, so that the adjustment causes the time to coincide with the greatest period of illumination by the sun over the course of the day.

Synonyms

This word in other languages

Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell "daylight saving time"?
"daylight saving time" is spelled D-A-Y-L-I-G-H-T- -S-A-V-I-N-G- -T-I-M-E.
What does "daylight saving time" mean?
As a noun, "daylight saving time" means: The practice in some places of adjusting clocks forward in the spring and back in the fall, usually by one hour, so that the adjustment causes the time to coincide with the greatest period of illum...
What language does "daylight saving time" come from?
"daylight saving time" is a English word. PlainSpell covers definitions, pronunciations, and spelling data across English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German.
Is PlainSpell free to use?
Yes, PlainSpell is a completely free word reference. You can look up definitions, pronunciations, confusable pairs, homophones, and spelling corrections across 5 languages without any sign-up or subscription.

Using “daylight saving time”

The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.

  • The one correct English spelling is D-A-Y-L-I-G-H-T- -S-A-V-I-N-G- -T-I-M-E - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
  • Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Data Source

Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.

Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org) Structured Wiktionary extract

Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list