<P> A number of proposals have been made to replace UTC with a new system that would eliminate leap seconds, and the decision to remove them altogether has been deferred until 2023 . </P> <P> The current version of UTC is defined by International Telecommunications Union Recommendation (ITU - R TF. 460 - 6), Standard - frequency and time - signal emissions and is based on International Atomic Time (TAI) with leap seconds added at irregular intervals to compensate for the slowing of Earth's rotation . Leap seconds are inserted as necessary to keep UTC within 0.9 seconds of universal time, UT1 . See the "Current number of leap seconds" section for the number of leap seconds inserted to date . </P> <P> The official abbreviation for Coordinated Universal Time is UTC . This abbreviation arose from a desire by the International Telecommunication Union and the International Astronomical Union to use the same abbreviation in all languages . English speakers originally proposed CUT (for "coordinated universal time"), while French speakers proposed TUC (for "temps universel coordonné"). The compromise that emerged was UTC, which conforms to the pattern for the abbreviations of the variants of Universal Time (UT0, UT1, UT2, UT1R, etc .). </P> <P> Time zones around the world are expressed using positive or negative offsets from UTC, as in the list of time zones by UTC offset . </P>

Why is coordinated universal time utc and not cut
find me the text answering this question