Armistice Day

The anniversary of the day (11 Nov 1918) on which World War 1 ended, marked in the UK by a two-minute silence at 11 o'clock, the hour when the fighting stopped (the armistice agreement having been signed six hours earlier); replaced after World War 2 by Remembrance Sunday. The US equivalent is Veterans' Day.

Armistice Day is the anniversary of the official end of World War I, November 11, 1918. While this official date to mark the end of the war reflects the ceasefire on the Western Front, hostilities continued in other regions, especially across the former Russian Empire and in parts of the old Ottoman Empire.

The date was a national holiday in many of the former allied nations to allow people to commemorate those members of the armed forces who were killed during war. After World War II, it was changed to Veterans Day in the United States and to Remembrance Day in the Commonwealth of Nations. Armistice Day is an official holiday in Belgium, known also as the day of peace in the Flanders Fields.

In many parts of the world, people take two minutes of silence at 1100h as a sign of respect for the roughly eight million who died in the war, as suggested by Edward George Honey in a letter to a British newspaper though Wellesley Tudor Pole established two ceremonial periods of remembrance based on events in 1917.