Why is it UTC?
Today I learned that UTC is called UTC, because people in an international committee tried to prefer no language.
In 1970, the Coordinated Universal Time system was devised by an international advisory group of technical experts within the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The ITU felt it was best to designate a single abbreviation for use in all languages in order to minimize confusion. For example, in English the abbreviation for coordinated universal time would be CUT, while in French the abbreviation for “temps universel coordonné” would be TUC. To avoid appearing to favor any particular language, the abbreviation UTC was selected.
— NIST “Why is UTC used as the acronym for Coordinator Universal Time instead of CUT?”
I came across this after reading a toot from December 2023 that had a screenshot attached providing basically the same explanation as above. After asking for a linked source, I got a link to a wonderful book on the Ruby on Rails where the screenshot was from, but also a link to the quote above from NIST.