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Comment by MegaButts | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact - there is some disagreement as to what the "D" in D-Day stands for. It seems most people agree it's just D for Day (so Day Day, sort of like how the LA Angels translates to the the angels angels), although some people think it's short for decision.

https://time.com/5599811/d-day-meaning/

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I suspected it meant Doomsday, when I was little (too much Superfriends on TV).

However, I believe it's just military lingo, as the military seems to treat acronyms and symbols as an art of functional entertainment.

https://www.history.com/news/why-was-it-called-d-day

In french, we say "le jour J" (literally "the D Day") to mean "the day where the thing happens" without knowing the actual date, J is like a variable here. Then you can talk about "le jour J-1", "J-2"...

Is the way this piece presents, e.g., "D-Day -21" and "D-Day +2" historically accurate? I had always thought it was D-21 and D+2, explaining D-Day as being the D±0.

As I recall it's for Day, because there's also H-hour for the time of the day to start, per Oxford Dictionaries "the time of day at which an attack, landing, or other military operation is scheduled to begin." "they assured the Marines that at H-hour the reef would be covered by five feet of water"

I was told that in addition to codifying D+1 etc that "D-Day" was also phonetically derived from the term "the day", pronounced "thee" indicating a significant day in a still somewhat ambiguous way.

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