2000–2009
| Millennium: | 3rd millennium |
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The 2000s (pronounced "two-thousands" or "twenty-hundreds") was a decade of the Gregorian calendar that began on January 1, 2000, and ended on December 31, 2009.
The growth of the Internet contributed to globalization during the decade, which allowed faster communication among people around the world.
The economic growth of the 2000s had considerable social, environmental and mass extinction consequences, raised demand for diminishing energy resources, and was still vulnerable, as demonstrated by the financial crisis of 2007–08.
In the English-speaking world, a name for the decade was never universally accepted in the same manner as for decades such as the '80s, the '90s, etc.
Orthographically, the decade can be written as the "2000s" or the "'00s". Some people read "2000s" as "two-thousands", and thus simply refer to the decade as the "Two-Thousands", the "Twenty Hundreds", or the "Twenty-ohs". Some read it as the "00s" (pronounced "Ohs", "Oh Ohs", "Double Ohs" or "Ooze"), while others referred to it as the "Zeros". On January 1, 2000, the BBC listed the noughties (derived from "nought" a word used for zero in many English-speaking countries), as a potential moniker for the new decade. This has become a common name for the decade in the UK and Australia, as well as other Anglospheric countries.
Others have advocated the term "the aughts", a term widely used at the beginning of the 20th century for its first decade. The American Dialect Society holds a lighthearted annual poll for word of the year and related subcategories. For 2009, the winner in the "least likely to succeed" category was "Any name of the decade 2000–2009, such as: Noughties, Aughties, Oughties, etc."
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