2010
calendar year
2010 (MMX) was a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar, the 2010th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 10th year of the 3rd millennium and the 21st century, and the 1st year of the 2010s decade.
The year saw a multitude of natural and environmental disasters such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and the 2010 Chile earthquake. The swine flu pandemic which began the previous year dissipated in this year. In addition, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) gained four new members; Chile, Slovenia, Israel, and Estonia. 2010 also saw advancements in technology such as the release of the iPad, the public launch of Instagram, and the first successful trapping of antimatter.
2010 was designated as:
International Year of Biodiversity
International Year of Youth
2010 European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion
International Year for the Rapprochement of Cultures
Pronunciation
There is a debate among experts and the general public on how to pronounce specific years of the 21st century in English. The year 2010 is pronounced either "twenty-ten" or "two thousand (and) ten". 2010 was the first year to have a wide variation in pronunciation, because the years 2000 to 2009 were generally pronounced "two thousand (and) one, two, three, etc." as opposed to the less common "twenty-oh-_".
Events
January
January 4 – The tallest man-made structure to date, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, is officially opened.
January 8 – The Togo national football team is attacked in Cabinda Province, Angola, and as a result withdraws from the Africa Cup of Nations.
The public source identifies “2010” as calendar year. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around calendar and year.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “2010”, the useful work is to connect “calendar year” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1995. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2010, 2000 and 2009.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “2010”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow 2010 primary sources, 2010 archive and calendar research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “2010”?
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This entry incorporates text from “2010” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.