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Three (possibly distinct) examples:

  1. A date which never exists/existed, like February 31
  2. A date which was 'skipped' because of calendar changes. When Russia transitioned from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar it 'skipped' October 26, 1917, among other days.
  3. A date/time which was 'skipped' due to a daylight savings change, like 02:01 on 03/27/2011 in the USA

These all appear to be properly formatted, but don't exist, at least in some parts of the planet that recognize the standard US date/time lexicon.

This question discusses the phrase to show to application users when they choose an invalid date, but invalid date would include 01/blah/-2 and other entries that don't conform to an accepted date format.

I've been using the term irrational date, but I'm not a mathematician and don't know if it is appropriate to compare these situations to irrational numbers.

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eebbesen
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    "Invalid date" seems to be pretty widely used by the IT community, although the scope may be narrower than what you are looking for. – Lumberjack Oct 23 '13 at 16:25
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    Imaginary date is what occurred to me. At some point in the past, some Wikipedia editor decided to use the term, too. –  Oct 23 '13 at 17:28
  • The question this is marked as a duplicate of is along the same lines, but is asking for a phrase, presumably to display to a computer user. I was (am) wondering if there's a single word or short term that describes this, like 'leap year'. It appears there is not :). – eebbesen Jan 07 '16 at 15:59

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