Perfectly clear, and probably in most contexts less likely to elicit off-by-one errors. The only confusing things I can see are:
Maybe someone might think you just meant the first decade of the 1900s?
Similarly, is “the 2000s” a century or a decade or a millennium? (This and
the previous problem are solved by using e.g., “19xx”, but that’s probably
only clear in written language.)
This style (it seems to me) is more common with older stuff (e.g., the 1800s
and 1700s), so someone might do a double-take at “the 1900s”, thinking it
sounds longer ago than it is.
There’s also the thing of how the twentieth century is, if we’re being
pedantic,
not the years 1900 through 1999, but the years 1901 through 2000.
Perfectly clear, and probably in most contexts less likely to elicit off-by-one errors. The only confusing things I can see are:
Maybe someone might think you just meant the first decade of the 1900s?
Similarly, is “the 2000s” a century or a decade or a millennium? (This and the previous problem are solved by using e.g., “19xx”, but that’s probably only clear in written language.)
This style (it seems to me) is more common with older stuff (e.g., the 1800s and 1700s), so someone might do a double-take at “the 1900s”, thinking it sounds longer ago than it is.
There’s also the thing of how the twentieth century is, if we’re being pedantic, not the years 1900 through 1999, but the years 1901 through 2000.
The person who was confused was so used to “the nth century” that “the xx00s” didn’t register as the same thing.