Citime

Citime is a term that has been used in multiple contexts to refer to time or time-related concepts in information technology and related fields. There is no single, formal standard for citime, and its meaning depends on the context. In many technical tutorials and sample code, citime is used as an abstract variable name representing a point in time, a duration, or a time value; it is commonly shown alongside operations such as retrieving the current time, formatting timestamps, and comparing times. In distributed systems and databases, citime can appear as a hypothetical or illustrative time source used to explain clock synchronization, time zone handling, and the ordering of events.

In software libraries, some projects use a function or type named citime to encapsulate time values, while others show it as a placeholder in examples to avoid tying code to a particular time API. Because citime is not standardized, real-world deployments must map citime concepts to concrete representations such as Unix timestamps, ISO 8601 strings, or internal time types specific to a language or framework.

Notes on usage: the term often serves as a didactic placeholder rather than a formal specification. When encountering citime in documentation, readers should look for the surrounding definitions to determine whether it refers to a specific data type, a function, or a conceptual time value within that context. See also time, timestamp, clock, ISO 8601.