Crunchbase's Dates are somewhat more complex than a typical Date object.

In some contexts, Crunchbase allows users to enter only part of a date. For example, when a user creates or edits a Person, (s)he can set the "deceased" date to a year, omitting the month and day.

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In the above example, a user has entered the date on which Steve Jobs died as simply "2011". We store (and return) this date as "January 1, 2011", but we also store the fact that the user only entered the year.

We annotate this date with what we call a "TrustCode". Our Date TrustCodes tell API users which parts of the Date object can be "trusted" (e.g., which parts of the date were populated by a contributor or data partner and which parts are simply placeholders).