So what would I say to my students?!! However your responses were really helpful :) Thx guys and girls

I'm a U.S. native speaker and I've never heard the word "noughties" here. To be honest, I, and everybody else, actually has a problem referring to the decades 2000-2009 inclusive and 2010-2019 inclusive. Of course, for 2010-2019 we can always fall back on "the current decade." It's a problem for historic decades, too. 1900-1909? Personally I would say "the opening decade of the twentieth century." Or, sorry, "the Edwardian era."

The names of decades vary a bit between the Americas and the UK and many are the same. Some of my favourite names of the decades are: 1890s - The Gay Nineties 1920s- The Roaring Twenties Note that these are the same for the Americas and the UK. For the 1980s the name changes depending on who you ask. It is known as 'the decade of decadence, greedy eighties, and egregious eighties. Time magazine called the 2000s 'the decade from hell'. You can find fan pages to this time sometimes referring to is as 'twenti0s'. 2000 - 2009 is known as 'the noughties' for most. 2010s - The Tensies Honestly, we don't have a settled name for this decade and rightfully so it it not over yet! When you do a little bit of research you realise that a decade name usually doesn't stick until after the decade. These are all just nicknames and you should not stress too much over them but have fun. Native speakers are still having fun coming up with nicknames. What do you think it should be? Which ones would you change?

2000-2009 is most commonly called the noughties. That is a bit unusual because all previous decades like that 1900s 1800s are not called noughties. We say nineteen hundreds and eighteen hundreds. There isn't really a word for the current decade yet. As we are still in it. So we would say "this decade" or "the current decade". We called 1910s the nineteen tens.

We called the first decade of the 21st century "the noughties". "Nought" means "zero", but "noughties" is pronounced exactly like "naughties", which is a joke suggesting we just misbehaved. :D This isn't an original idea, as 1900-1910 were also called "the noughties". I'm not sure about the current decade. The twenty-tens? Twenty-teens? Or maybe just the teens? I've never worried about it.