timeZoneName

TimeZoneName is a label used to identify the time zone associated with a location for the purpose of interpreting, converting, storing, and displaying times. In many systems, time zone names come in two forms: canonical identifiers from the IANA Time Zone Database and human-readable abbreviations. The IANA form uses a region/location pattern such as Europe/Paris or America/New_York, encoding the locale's standard time offset and daylight saving rules. Abbreviations like CET, EST, or IST are short labels that may be shared by multiple regions and can be ambiguous; they do not convey the full historical DST changes and are not stable across systems or locales.

In software, the timeZoneName is used to interpret a timestamp and to present it to users in their local or chosen locale. Programs typically store the canonical time zone ID and compute the corresponding offset for a given date, taking DST into account, to render correct local times. When displaying times, applications may show both the time and a time zone name, and they may localize the name according to the user's language.

Best practices include using a stable IANA time zone identifier for storage and back-end logic, avoiding reliance on abbreviations for data interchange, and separating the concerns of time computation from presentation by deriving a display name at the UI layer using locale-aware formatting.

Related concepts include daylight saving time, UTC, and the IANA time zone database.