Word.ws English Dictionary

millennium bug

millennium bug proper noun: a design flaw in computer systems that represented years as two digits (e.g. 84 for 1984), which could cause date calculations to fail if they involved years later than 1999.

millennium bug: a design flaw in computer systems that represented years as two digits (e.g. 84 for 1984), which...
Image: Bug de l'an 2000, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Proper noun

millennium bug

  1. A design flaw in computer systems that represented years as two digits (e.g. 84 for 1984), which could cause date calculations to fail if they involved years later than 1999.
    • Mr Johnson also said the Northern Irish border row had been blown out of proportion and compared fears over disruption over vital goods coming into the UK to "pure millennium bug stuff".2018 June 7, Lizzy Buchan, “Boris Johnson says Trump could handle Brexit better and warns of 'meltdown' in explosive leaked recording”, in The Independent, London: Independent News & Media, →ISSN...

Synonyms of millennium bug

Questions about millennium bug

What does millennium bug mean?
Millennium bug means a design flaw in computer systems that represented years as two digits (e.g. 84 for 1984), which could cause date calculations to fail if they involved years later than 1999.
What part of speech is millennium bug?
Millennium bug is a proper noun.

Words near millennium bug in the dictionary

  1. millenniarism
  2. millenniary
  3. millennist
  4. millennists
  5. millennium
  6. millennium bug
  7. Millennium Development Goal
  8. Millennium Development Goals
  9. Millennium Dome
  10. millennium egg
  11. millennium eggs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: millennium bug (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “millennium bug.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/millennium_bug. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.