To make our lives harder, they are also called “time zones” in casual conversation.
What about things like “Eastern Standard Time,” “Central Time,” and “Eastern Daylight Saving Time,” you ask? These are abbreviations for offsets that are loosely tied to place. When we say, “Indiana switched from Central to Eastern Time,” we actually mean “Time zones in in Indiana changed from one offset to another.” Sometimes laws change a time zone’s offset or daylight savings pattern. A time zone’s offset can change throughout the year because of Daylight Saving Time. An offset is the number of hours or minutes a certain time zone is ahead of or behind GMT**. In fact, the map above pointing out Coral Harbor and Detroit is a map of time zones around the world. So sometimes, the good people of Coral Harbour and the good people of Detroit have the same offset. America/Detroit changes during the year from an -0400 offset to an -0500 offset. With laws as they are now, the America/Coral_Harbour time zone has an unchanging offset of -0500, or five hours “behind” GMT, which for our purposes here matches UTC. 
Our ExampleĪmerica/Coral_Harbour is a time zone (for simplicity, I will focus only on IANA* time zones). Here, I want to make the difference crystal-clear, so each of us can make our own decisions about when to use which (or both).
It has been said many times, many ways: Offsets are not time zones, and time zones are not offsets! Some blog posts argue for one over the other.
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