Gillette is the one razor maker in this archive that published a real alphabet, and it is the reason the brand dominates every search for what year is my razor. The system is simple in form and awkward in practice: one letter for the year, one digit for the quarter, stamped into the underside of the guard. The digit gives a quarter and never a problem. The letter is where every confident wrong answer is born, because the alphabet has twenty-five letters and it starts over.
Where the stamp is, and how to read it cleanly
The code is found in the top left and right corners on the underside of the razor guard, on both three-piece and one-piece models. On a three-piece razor the easiest read is to unscrew the handle and look at the plate directly rather than fishing at it from the side. That one habit removes most misreadings before they happen.
It is also worth magnifying and lighting the stamp from a low angle. A worn O reads as a Q, and a blurred 0 or 1 reads as an O or an I — the collector sources warn about this in exactly those terms, and it is why a Q on a razor is treated here as a conflict rather than as a letter.
The digit is the easy half
The number corresponds with the quarter of the year, and the canonical example given by the collector wiki is that A-1 means January to March 1930. So the four digits read like this:
- 1 — January to March.
- 2 — April to June.
- 3 — July to September.
- 4 — October to December.
A digit on its own is not a date code at all: the quarter only becomes a date when the letter beside it has been resolved to a year.
The alphabet has twenty-five letters, not twenty-six
This is the first fact that separates the working charts from the wrong ones. The sequence runs A through P, jumps straight to R, and carries on to Z, because the letter Q was not used. That is why 1970 is P and 1971 is R with nothing between them. At least one well-ranked date-code chart lists both Q and R against 1971, and that error — the letter Q printed as a year — is the single most recognisable mistake in the field.
Then the alphabet repeats
Twenty-five letters cover twenty-five years, and then the sequence starts over at A. This is the second fact that separates a good chart from a bad one, and it is the reason a chart that opens with A against 1950 is off by five years on every row it prints.
The practical consequence is that a bare letter is not unique. D is 1933, 1958 and 1983 all at once. The letters A through U each mean exactly one year inside the razor-code era, 1955 through 1974. The five letters V, W, X, Y and Z sit at the tail of one cycle and the head of the next, so each of them genuinely means two possible years: 1950 through 1954, or 1975 through 1979. The 2026 source that sets this out most explicitly adds that the model is what resolves it, and the adjustable-razor archive keeps a whole table whose purpose is exactly that — a D on one razor family is 1958 and on another it is 1983.
Where the era begins, and where it ends
Two boundaries are disputed by the sources, and this archive prints both positions rather than choosing.
- The start. The collector wiki prints 1950 against the letter V and notes that razor date coding begins with that stamp, and a 2026 tool puts razors from 1950 as well; the shop guide that reproduces the same table in its fuller form states that the codes were used from January 1951 until 2001, which is the letter W. Four positions in all, three of them saying 1950 and one saying 1951.
- The end. The collector wiki ends its table at 1988 with a sentence about one of the last batches of USA-made double-edge razors; the shop guide states 2001 and prints rows that far; a 2026 cycle chart runs to 2004. Between 1989 and 2001 only five year rows are actually printed by any source, and the rest are decade markers — a group of letters standing for a whole decade — rather than year rows.
What that means in practice is that a razor stamped in the 1990s is dated from a decade marker and a cycle, not from a printed year row, and a 1980s razor sits at the end of one table and in the middle of another.
What the code cannot do
The code dates a razor and a blade with the same alphabet, but the two have different eras. Gillette began date coding blades in 1930, and the same letter-and-quarter form appears on razors from 1950 or 1951. A blade from a set is therefore weak evidence for the razor: the collector wiki states plainly that this is not one hundred percent accurate, since the blades may not be original or may have been made before or after the razor. And a razor with no code at all is not evidence of a fake — American razors carry no code whatever from 1930 to 1949, and British and German razors frequently carry none in any period.
The honest reading of a date code, then, is a year plus a quarter when the letter is unambiguous, and a set of candidate years resolved by the model when it is not. Start from the date-code system page, or read why the letter Q is not a Gillette year.