12:00AM is midnight because AM is morning, and it’s the beginning of the morning.
Using 12-hour time is just a historical artifact from all our analog clocks having 12 hours on their face and not wanting to have to add 12 to the number on the clock for half the day.
Where I’m from, 12:00 a.m. (00:00) is the middle of the night (we call it midnight here), and morning begins when the sun rises (and we say “good morning” during our mornings).
Put more specifically, A.M. and P.M. are abbreviations for “ante meridiem” and “post meridiem”, which are Latin for “before mid-day” and “after mid-day” respectively. Since a new day begins at midnight, it follows that midnight is 12:00 A.M. since it’s the 12 o’clock that is before mid-day.
12AM is midnight. As for the other part I have this mind blowing concept for you, our culture is not the same as yours. We have our own ways of doing things, just like you.
Why should anyone cut time in two zones? How does it help or benefit anyone? If anything, it only serves to add extra confusion. In the era of electronic time keeping, there is a wonderful opportunity to ditch an extremely stupid decision that was proliferated by analog clocks.
We have 24 hours in a day, just count them one by one. Boom. Problem solved. No confusion, no complications, no nothing.
Because unless you live underground, are blind, or live so far north or south that the day night cycle loses cohesion it’s literally as easy as “Can I see daylight?” If you really want to fix it round hours out to 20-30 for easier conversion between days and smaller units, 7 day weeks? That’s backwards and hard to convert mentally, make them 10 days. Months are just tied to the lunar cycle we can do better surely. Years are stuck though unless we speed up or slow the Earth’s orbit. While we are at it, one time zone, if everyone is on identical clocks it’ll save so many issues, I don’t want to know when 21:00 is in Hong Kong, I’ll just call at Universal 11:00
Where I’m from, 12:00 a.m. (00:00) is the middle of the night (we call it midnight here), and morning begins when the sun rises (and we say “good morning” during our mornings).
So if you worked at a hotel or airport or a coffee shop or something and you saw someone shortly before sunrise you would say “Good night” not “Good morning”?
Not all languages work the same way as English does. You shouldn’t think in English terms in this case. His language may use hello as a rule in these situations or have a completely different word without equivalent in English.
The notations can be confusing, especially around noon and midnight. Is midnight am or pm when it’s equally distant to both the previous and the next noon? Why does 12am not follow 11am???
Where I live we use 12hr time in casual spoken language but pretty much always specify the time of day as well, like eight in the evening or twelve at midnight. But for anything written or even remotely formal, 24h time is used for obvious reasons.
Agreed. I’ve never understood the logic of splitting the hours of the day in half. 1800 is so much nicer than 6PM.
I don’t think that’s purely an American thing though. If I had to guess, I’d say that most of the world uses 12-hour clocks instead of 24-hours. I could be wrong though. Nevertheless, I usually write all times in 24-hour format. But it always sounds awkward trying to use it in speech. I haven’t figured out a good way to do that yet.
If you said “three at night” to an American, I think he’d have to process it for a minute. You’d say it’s _ in the morning from like 12:30AM through noon, _ in the afternoon from noon to about 6 or 7, then _ at night/evening from then till midnight.
Besides the dates, I also still don’t know if 12am is noon or midnight. Do Americans know? Is there a problem with simply counting to 24?
12:00AM is midnight because AM is morning, and it’s the beginning of the morning.
Using 12-hour time is just a historical artifact from all our analog clocks having 12 hours on their face and not wanting to have to add 12 to the number on the clock for half the day.
Where I’m from, 12:00 a.m. (00:00) is the middle of the night (we call it midnight here), and morning begins when the sun rises (and we say “good morning” during our mornings).
Put more specifically, A.M. and P.M. are abbreviations for “ante meridiem” and “post meridiem”, which are Latin for “before mid-day” and “after mid-day” respectively. Since a new day begins at midnight, it follows that midnight is 12:00 A.M. since it’s the 12 o’clock that is before mid-day.
That doesn’t make it less confusing, it’s the beginnng of the morning but uses the highest available number.
Yes, it makes perfect sense to count our hours as such:
12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
/s
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12AM is midnight. As for the other part I have this mind blowing concept for you, our culture is not the same as yours. We have our own ways of doing things, just like you.
Why should anyone cut time in two zones? How does it help or benefit anyone? If anything, it only serves to add extra confusion. In the era of electronic time keeping, there is a wonderful opportunity to ditch an extremely stupid decision that was proliferated by analog clocks.
We have 24 hours in a day, just count them one by one. Boom. Problem solved. No confusion, no complications, no nothing.
Because unless you live underground, are blind, or live so far north or south that the day night cycle loses cohesion it’s literally as easy as “Can I see daylight?” If you really want to fix it round hours out to 20-30 for easier conversion between days and smaller units, 7 day weeks? That’s backwards and hard to convert mentally, make them 10 days. Months are just tied to the lunar cycle we can do better surely. Years are stuck though unless we speed up or slow the Earth’s orbit. While we are at it, one time zone, if everyone is on identical clocks it’ll save so many issues, I don’t want to know when 21:00 is in Hong Kong, I’ll just call at Universal 11:00
Sure, there’s a lot wrong about the way we work with time and date. Months are not even tied to lunar cycles, we have around 13 of them in a year.
But conversion from 12 to 24 hour format is already there and easy to switch to without losing anything. Let’s start going rational.
Or we could just embrace minor cultural differences instead of smoothing humanity out into boring orthodoxy
I’m pretty sure the time ans date format is not what makes a culture special, though.
PM is evening, AM is morning.
I prefer 24hr time but 12hr is not confusing
Exactly and it’s such a minor thing to bitch about, I understand the date system frustration but over using AM/PM vs 24?
Where I’m from, 12:00 a.m. (00:00) is the middle of the night (we call it midnight here), and morning begins when the sun rises (and we say “good morning” during our mornings).
So if you worked at a hotel or airport or a coffee shop or something and you saw someone shortly before sunrise you would say “Good night” not “Good morning”?
Not all languages work the same way as English does. You shouldn’t think in English terms in this case. His language may use hello as a rule in these situations or have a completely different word without equivalent in English.
The notations can be confusing, especially around noon and midnight. Is midnight am or pm when it’s equally distant to both the previous and the next noon? Why does 12am not follow 11am???
Where I live we use 12hr time in casual spoken language but pretty much always specify the time of day as well, like eight in the evening or twelve at midnight. But for anything written or even remotely formal, 24h time is used for obvious reasons.
Agreed. I’ve never understood the logic of splitting the hours of the day in half. 1800 is so much nicer than 6PM.
I don’t think that’s purely an American thing though. If I had to guess, I’d say that most of the world uses 12-hour clocks instead of 24-hours. I could be wrong though. Nevertheless, I usually write all times in 24-hour format. But it always sounds awkward trying to use it in speech. I haven’t figured out a good way to do that yet.
Thailand splits theri days in 4 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_six-hour_clock)
Please, correct the link, cause now it has closing bracket included.
On substance - even that makes more sense, with 4 zones designating morning, afternoon, evening, and night. 2 zones conflate them.
In my country it’s normal to pronounce time in either format, and it doesn’t make any confusion.
Also we don’t use AM or PM when using 12-hour format: we say night/morning/day/evening. Like “3 in the day” means 3PM, or 15:00.
“Fifteen-o-o” works just fine as well.
In America you’ll hear “It’s three in the morning” or “It’s four in the afternoon.”
“Three in the morning” is super weird, like, it’s not morning, this thing is called night :D
If you said “three at night” to an American, I think he’d have to process it for a minute. You’d say it’s _ in the morning from like 12:30AM through noon, _ in the afternoon from noon to about 6 or 7, then _ at night/evening from then till midnight.
12:30AM is something that completely breaks my mind :D
We’re talking 00:30, right? And what if there is 0:15, for example?