Zeitfolge

Zeitfolge is a German term that denotes the chronological order of events or occurrences in time. It refers to the temporal sequence in which things happen, ranging from historical developments to narrative structures and data-driven events.

Etymologically, Zeitfolge combines Zeit (time) and Folge (sequence, succession). The word emphasizes the order of events as they unfold over time, rather than merely listing dates. In scholarly usage, Zeitfolge often serves to establish a coherent temporal framework for understanding processes, phases, or phenomena.

In practice, Zeitfolge appears across several disciplines. In historiography and archaeology, it describes the sequence of historical periods, cultural phases, or stratigraphic layers. In literature and film studies, it is used to analyze the arrangement of events within a plot, distinguishing between the told time and the actual chronology. In linguistics and psychology, researchers may examine the temporal ordering of events or actions within a narrative or experiment. In data contexts, "Zeitfolge" can refer to a temporal sequence of observations, though the more common technical term in statistics and econometrics is time series (Zeitreihe).

Related terms include Chronologie, Zeitreihe, Kronologie, and Timeline. While Zeitfolge emphasizes the order of events in time, Zeitreihe focuses on quantitative sequences of data points indexed by time, and Chronologie broadly covers the mapping of historical time.