What does B.C.E stand for?

I've heard Before Current Era (but obviously it may be Before Common Era). In other words it is the politically correct way of saying B.C.

A.D. was basically just dropped. It means Anno Domini ("year of the lord") and it would be unnecessary/redundant to say the year is 2012 A.D.

It means Before the Common Era. The reason for the change is that B.C. stood for Before Christ - and to followers of non-Christian religions, it was meaningless and in some cases offensive. So, B.C.E. was adopted as an innocuous way to demarcate the periods before and after a date that was set a little over 2,000 years ago. A.D. just refers to the period after Christ died. But if you use B.C.E. to denote something that happened before that event, you don't need to specify something that happened after so they have simply stopped using A.D.

Dates are now either B.C.E. or they are C.E. (current era) but almost no one uses C.E. - they just write the current date.

It is not "political"; it is the generally accepted international scholarly term for "Before the Common Era" (C.E. is the Common Era; the current year is 2012 C.E.).

By the way, you have to put a period after EVERY letter in an abbreviation like that; you left out the period after the "E" but there needs to be one there too. This seems to be an epidemic disease on this website: leaving out the final period in an abbreviation. Stop doing that.

It means Before Common Era the political term and B.C. means Before Christ.

i heard of that also