Until now there have been four standardized versions of C++: C++98, C++03, C++11, and C++14. And the versions have been consistently named (to be precise, "nicknamed") as "C++YY", where YY are the last two digits of the year in which that ISO standard was adopted.

Note: C++03 was a very minor change (sort of a "bug fix"), so people sometime refer to C++11 as direct successor of C++98. Also in the interim (2007) there was C++-TR1 ("ISO/IEC TR 19768:2007") which was not a formal standard per se, but instead a technical report specifying bunch of standard library extensions (which were formally included in C++11)

For sake of completeness: The format C++YY is the one which is commonly used almost everywhere, but the official language name follow ISO's convention. Here is a mapping:

C++98: "ISO/IEC 14882:1998 Programming languages C++"

C++03: "ISO/IEC 14882:2003 Programming languages C++"

C++11: "ISO/IEC 14882:2011 Programming Language C++"

C++14: "ISO/IEC 14882:2014 Programming Language C++"

There are also language classifier like (E), (F), etc present at the end (e.g., "ISO/IEC 14882:2014(E) Programming Language C++"). I am not sure if the official standard is fixed in a particular language, or are all the different language translations equally authoritative (I suspect the latter, but it's just a guess).

what do you mean?

C++ is a language designed by committee. C++14 is meant as a "tock" release, fixing some of the things in the C++11 "tick" release. ("tick" releases are larger, and "tock releases fix some of the problems in the "tick" release).

Compilers then attempt to implement the standard, and have their own versioning system.

Traditionally, "ticks" are small, and "tocks" are big. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Tick-Tock .

By the year the standard was published.

Fairly common programming language convention as well. I believe FORTRAN 66 and ALGOL 68 were the first standards widely referred to with a revision year. More recent examples include Fortran 90 (no more caps!) and C99.

I agree but it seems like newer languages adopted the 1.0, 2.0 versioning scheme so it might throw some people off.

That's somewhat more common with languages with a reference implementation instead of a specification.

Pre-standard C++ had that scheme as well! (well, CFront releases, http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/c_plus_plus#cfr... ).

Not just new languages. Java is also versioned from Java 1.0 to 1.1 to 1.2 ... 1.8, with recent versions dropping the "1." because they never will have a true "2.0" release.