A region keeping one civil time — and a country can have twenty-seven of them.
A time zone is a region that keeps a common civil time. Which zone applies where is decided by the state, not by geography: the boundaries follow borders and administrative lines rather than meridians, and states move them.
The trap is treating a country as a zone. Twenty-five of the countries in this corpus span more than one, and the United States spans twenty-seven once its territories are counted. Asking what time it is in Canada has no answer.
Because of this the corpus records a presentation zone per jurisdiction and says so. It is the zone a reader would expect for that place, and for a country spanning several it is a convenience rather than a fact.
Each of these countries keeps more than one civil time, so a single national clock is a fiction. The count is of distinct zones recorded for the country.
| 🇺🇸 | 27 zonesUnited States | No national timeIncluding territories. A meeting 'at 9am US time' names nothing. |
| 🇷🇺 | 16 zonesRussian Federation | No national timeSpanning most of the northern hemisphere's longitudes. |
| 🇧🇷 | 16 zonesBrazil | No national timeIncluding offshore islands. |
An offset is a number of hours from UTC at one moment. A time zone is a region with rules, and its offset changes when those rules say so.
An IANA identifier names a zone's rule history. A time zone in ordinary speech is the region.
See also utc offset · iana time zone · local time · daylight saving time
We record a presentation zone for all 241 jurisdictions and the full list where a country spans several — 25 of them do. See what we hold.