Paper to platinum: what each wedding anniversary is called

The three that survived on their own

Twenty-five years is the silver wedding, fifty is gold, sixty is diamond. These were being marked long before anyone thought to name the years in between, and for a plain reason: each falls roughly once in a lifetime, which is rare enough to be worth gathering people for.

The rest arrived later, filled in by almanacs, newspapers and the jewellery trade. That is why the early years sound like a linen cupboard and the late ones like a vault — and why nobody has ever said, out loud, that they are celebrating their lace wedding.

The traditional list, year by year

The shape of it is easy to read: cheap and perishable at the start, hard and expensive at the end. A few years carry two accepted names, because two lists were merged at some point and neither gave way. Where that happens, both are given below.

One warning about lists found online: several of them are American, and they differ. The US list puts linen at the fourth year, iron at the sixth and aluminium at the tenth, where Debrett's gives flowers, sugar and tin. Notice too where the British list stops caring: after fifteen it keeps only the years ending in nought or five. The French list is the outlier in Europe — it names every single year up to eighty, including several nobody has used in a century.

From the sixtieth, the King writes

This is the part of the British calendar that has no equivalent in France or Spain, and it is worth knowing before you plan a party. The King sends a congratulatory message for the diamond (60th), the 65th, the platinum (70th), and every anniversary after that.

It does not arrive on its own: somebody has to ask — the couple, a relative or a friend. And the rule is the opposite of what people assume. Those dates are a ceiling on how early you may apply, not a deadline: no sooner than five weeks before online, or three weeks by post, with a copy of the marriage certificate. Apply in January for a June anniversary and the request is simply refused. A late one, on the other hand, is accepted up to six months afterwards.

It is for British nationals, and for citizens of the King's other realms — couples living in Australia, Canada or New Zealand apply to their own Governor-General instead. Germany has a comparable custom, but it starts later: the Federal President writes only from sixty-five years, and the request goes through the town hall. France and Spain leave it to the local council, or to nobody at all.

The same anniversary, a different name abroad

The milestones agree across Europe: silver at twenty-five, gold at fifty, diamond at sixty are fixed everywhere. Between them the lists drift apart, and the drift catches people out when a gift crosses the Channel or a couple keeps two family traditions at once.

The expensive one to get wrong is the fortieth. Ruby here, ruby in Germany and Spain — but emerald in France, where ruby has been moved down to thirty-five. Buy a ruby for a French couple's fortieth and you are five years out by their reckoning, even though you are exactly right by ours.

Why no two lists match

No authority ever ratified any of this. Each list was assembled commercially, one gap at a time, which is why a modern list sits beside the traditional one in most shops — clocks for the first year, watches for the fifteenth — and why neither can claim to be the real one.

Two things follow. If a family list says something different from this page, the family list wins; there is no referee. And on anything you have engraved, put the wedding date rather than the number of years. A date stays true. “40 years” is wrong twelve months later, and engraving does not come undone.