18391903

18391903 is a numeric string that can appear in historical, bibliographic, and archival contexts. In standard biographical writing, the lifespan of an individual is typically shown with an en dash between birth and death years, written as 1839–1903. When digits are concatenated as 18391903, the intended meaning becomes ambiguous without context: it may be used as a compact identifier, a file name, or a data entry in a catalog where separators are not permitted.

In biographical databases and archival catalogs, 18391903 can function as a code referencing a person whose full details are stored in separate fields. It may also indicate a time span from 1839 to 1903 associated with a historical period, event window, or the active years of a study subject, depending on the metadata schema. The lack of punctuation requires additional information to determine the exact interpretation, so many standards require explicit birth and death fields rather than a single concatenated string.

Practical considerations include search and interoperability issues. Systems that treating 18391903 as a single number may hinder date-based queries or chronological sorting, whereas properly separated fields enable accurate filtering by year. When encountered, researchers should consult the surrounding metadata to confirm whether the string encodes a lifespan, a period, or serves as an identifier.

See also: 1839, 1903, lifespan, date range, en dash.