What is the full form of CE?

CE stands for the "Common Era".

What is CE (Common Era)?

It is also known as the term Christian Era. It is used to identify a slot of the year. The significance of using this term is that when this term is used it means in the time frame of a year and especially is not used to describe a very long time other than a year itself. The most common use of CE is that it is used to record dates that are used worldwide.

Though it has replaced AD which is the abbreviation of Anno Domini which translates to “year of the lord”, which was originally used by the Christians for a very long period of time, the number from both the systems are similar to each other. For example, this year can also be written as 2021 CE which holds a similar value as AD 2021. This represents a more technical term but in general, usually, people don’t fuss about it more and they use the basic term such as the year 2021.

Since AD directly means “year of the lord” which holds value for the Catholics, but it often offended the people belonging to the different religious groups, hence the introduction of a new term was of extreme importance.

When writing about calendars, an era is the span of dates, starting from a particular moment in time. In the case of both CE and AD, that start date is approximately the date of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Neither system uses a year zero (0): the year before 1 CE was 1 BCE.