Why is it that Americans refer to 24 hour time as military time? I understand that the military uses the 24hr format but I don’t understand why the general public would refer to it like that?
It makes it seem like it’s a foreign concept where as in a lot of countries it’s the norm.
Because that’s exactly how we see it. It IS a completely foreign concept. The general public does not use 24hr at all. The only time we ever hear it, is when someone in the military says it.
Our country is so big and heavily populated (and most of our many, many populated areas are overshadowed by a few really touristy places like New York, the Disney parks and Yellowstone National Park and Hawaii which isn’t even that American) and that you’ll rarely encounter someone from a country that uses the 24 hour system. Canada uses the 12-hour clock if I remember correctly from when I last went there, and I think Mexico does since we usually learn their dialect of Spanish in school (but I’m not sure, in all my spanish classes they taught us to say “son las ocho y media en la noche” for 8:30 PM, instead of “veinte y media horas” as I was taught when I studied in Spain for a semester)
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Quebec uses 24h, rest of Canada uses 12h.
Quebec does a lot of dumb shit that isn’t consistent with the rest of Canada
Shocking that a distinct society, a separate nation within Canada, has different customs…
Hard to consider using 24hr time amongst the ‘dumb shit’ though.
Agreed. I use 24 hour time on all my devices, working in IT it just makes things easier.
Most countries that use 24h time (Western Europe, ime) use both interchangeably - saying “at 18” or “at six in the evening” are both totally normal.
Just to add to this. I found a map on Wikipedia that shows this.
That map looks quite inaccurate, I wonder where they got that info.
Nobody says “veinte y media”. It’s “veinte treinta”, and everyone understands that and it’s shorter than “ocho y media de la noche”, which everyone understands as well. They’re completely interchangeable and nobody would find either strange or unusual.
It may be rare to find someone who uses it in regular conversation, but medical, logistics, IT, and military commonly used it… Everyone likely knows a few people that use it.
It is literally a foreign concept to the vast majority of them (only other countries use it widely in everyday life) and the military is one of the very few contexts in which they will experience it.
Because over here, it’s generally only the military that uses 24-hour time and where most people learn it.
Lots of good answers here, but I don’t see anyone mentioning the minor differences between military time and 24 hour. With military time, they don’t use a colon when writing it, and they always verbally say the leading zero. So a time using a 24 hour clock is written 06:00 or 6:00 and said verbally as “six o’clock”, but with military time, it is written as 0600 and said verbally as “Oh six hundred hours”.
That’s it. That’s the only difference. Though many Americans do indeed incorrectly call any 24 hour clock “military time”. I myself used to say it incorrectly when I was a kid because my parents said it incorrectly.
So they say 17 o’clock?
Mil - seventeen-hundred Civ - seventeen-o’clock
As a civilian who uses the 24h system, I say “five o’clock”, but write “1700”
I say 17 o’clock.
Like the bastardization of the 24h clock by the television companies, doesn’t Amarican military time also allow for relative time instead of absolute? Like writing 5:00 on the second day of a time critical mission as 2900?
I’m pretty sure I heard this somewhere, though I have yet to verify this claim.
Sort of? Ime you’ll sometimes hear/see things like T+2900, meaning 2900 minutes after T (T being a common placeholder for “the moment the operation began”). But unless the mission started at 0000, T+2900 doesn’t mean 0500, it means +2900 since T
By the time I solve for T, the mission will be over.
I guess that does make sense, and definitely not as bad as I had misunderstood it to be.
It feels a little weird, and I’m not sure if T+29:00 or equivalents are allowed in ISO 8601, but I have seen computer programs that represent time differences in similar ways.
Thank you for the clarification!
Related question. Do 24 hour clock folks say fourteen o’clock if they’re talking about 2pm?
1400 (fourteen hundred)
In my country younger individuals like me use the 24 hour system a lot verbally. Older generations from before smartphones (which always use 24 hour) uses the 12 hour system more.
But in general I would argue that people use the 24 hour system when talking about something which needs precision, like when the train arrives. And the 12 hour system when talking about something like when to meet a friend (it’s still very important to arrive on time though, regardless of how imprecise the time was, “about five” means five.)
They say fourteen hundred or 2 o’clock. I’ve never really heard anyone say 14 o’clock.
We definitely just called it 14 where I grew up
We called it 14 in Alabama. You’re talking about age of censent, right?
In both Polish and German people say fourteen o’clock.
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking
thirteenfourteen”
I’m Dutch. Usually we just say something like “2 in the afternoon” instead of 14:00 or 2 PM. But digital clocks and writing etc will use 24 hours. Every now and then people will use it though, saying 14:30 as “fourteen hours thirty”, but that’s quite rare and sounds a bit formal (or goofy).
In France, people commonly use the 24h format. Any time given in a formal setting (given on TV, opening hours for a business, etc.) will be in 24h format. Some people still use 12h though.
I’m a nurse who uses 24-hr time at work and it’s about 50/50 with me saying “fourteen hundred” or “2pm” when speaking. I generally find that my colleagues understand both and use both interchangeably.
In French, it’s pretty common to say 14 o’clock.
La fête est à quatorze heures.
Which is French for “I expect you’ll show up some time between 15:00 and 19:00.”
I’m german. if it’s completely unambiguous, we simply say “dinner is at 6” or “my shift ends at 4”. but when you want to make sure that there’s no room for confusion we say “let’s meet at 21 o’clock”.
In Denmark we say “2 o’clock” or just “14”, sometimes also “14 o’clock”. No one says fourteen hundred, except perhaps for a few military wannabes.
If it’s quarter past 2, we’d usually say “14-15”. Half past 2 would be “14-30”, you get the idea.
If we mean to say “from 2 o’clock to 3 o’clock”, we’ll say “14 to 15”, which I imagine can be confusing for the uninitiated, as the only difference from “quarter past 2” would be a “to”.
For those downvoting me, what do you say? I imagine it must be other Danes or neighboring countries, as one surely wouldn’t downvote a culturally dependant statement if not from said culture.
Same in Norway, unsurprisingly, but we do say 14 0 0 (fjorten null null) if making it clear that we mean 1400 exact. Otherwise like you said, klokken 14 or klokken 2.
I basically always write the time as a four-figure number, and verbally refer to 1400 as “two o’clock”, “two in the afternoon” etc. in English but “viertien uur” or “twee uur” in Dutch.
Edit: I used to work in a train station in the UK, and we’d always say train times as (one- or two-figure number)(0 like “o” if it’s there)(one- or two-figure number). So 1400 is fourteen-o-o, 1407 is fourteen-o-seven, 1412 is fourteen twelve, 0502 is five-o-two. Among staff, we’d refer to them just by the minutes, so the o-two, the seventeen, the forty-eight, etc.
Doesn’t military time also use 24th hour followed by hour 1 instead of 0?
Army here, we always say 0000 for midnight, but honestly that’s probably just because it’s what our phones and watches call it. Perhaps it was different before electronic timekeeping was the norm.
That’s interesting. How do they say it out loud? If 6am / 6:00 / 0600 is said “oh six hundred”, is 0000 “oh oh hundred”? “oh zero hundred”? “zero thousand”? “quadruple oh”?
Zero-Dark-Thirty
Oh-zero-hundred or zero-hundred if we gotta. Generally… Midnight lol
oh oh oh oh
zero zero zero zero
oh zero hundred
midnight
twelve
what a trip
That’s interesting. Marine here and once when I was deployed and writing up “significant event” reports for briefs, the Watch Officer never wanted to say 0000. He thought it would be too confusing when looking back and trying to figure which day it actually was. Is 0000 on 20231023 Monday at midnight or Sunday at midnight? He had us use either 2359 or 0001 and the date to clarify. 0000 didn’t exist for him, but it might have just been his own personal pet peeve.
It’s pretty commonly done with 12hr time too, for the same reason: to help protect against stupidity.
Watch officers HATE this one ambiguous millitary time/dating convention
00:00 is the time with the new (“tomorrow”) date, 24:00 is the time with the old (“yesterday”) date.
24:00 isnt really used, in my experience. Also, many people dont mentally switch dates until they went to bed.
Its because in America most people’s only experience with it is when the movie says “meet here at 0700 hrs.” Really isn’t much deeper than that, we also call “ranger green” “ranger green” whether an army ranger is wearing it or not, despite it really being “just a shade of green.” Sometimes things are just called things.
“Ranger Green” the hell is that?
I’m an army veteran and I’ve never heard that term. Army Green, yes, but that’s pretty rare, too.
What color even is “Ranger Green” other than OD?
Do I look like a swatch to you?
If this was a case of things just being called things, it would be its own word. For example, a door is called a door because things are just called things. But military time is obviously a reference to something entirely different, that doesn’t actually have anything to do with time. So there’s more to it than just being called that.
Ranger green is called like that, because it’s the shade of green rangers wear. And not “just because”. Same with military time. It’s called like that because people associate it with military, be it from seeing it in military movies, or by using it in the military themselves.
Ah but when is a door not a door?
When it’s a window.
There is no spoon.
When it’s a painting
When it’s ajar.
+10pts
Where’s lemmy gold when we need it?
Given how they use different systems to measure almost everything than the rest of the world, I’d say I’m OK with them not using the 24h format, I’d expect them to use something like the 27 American hours, divided in 109 minutes of 31 seconds each.
You mean the 50 hour freedom clock? One hour for each state, yee-haw!
You mean freedom minutes, right??
Sorry, you’re right. And stars and stripes minutes
The freedom clock, where hours are called “freedoms”, minutes are called “stars” and seconds are called “stripes”.
Stop giving them ideas!
HOOAH
Ljbol
Agreed
Here in California, I’ve heard both “military time” and “24 hour time” used interchangeably for writing the time as “03:45” or “16:20”. That said, I’ve heard – citation needed – that proper military time does not use the colon, such as “1600”, pronounced as “sixteen hundred hours”.
As for why the public might refer to this generally as “military time”, it may just be that that’s the most common, well-known use-case in the States, outside of the sciences. I personally use 24 hour time on all my devices, but I’ve come across many people who prefer clockfaces or AM/PM, probably out of habit.
By the book, you’re right. No colon when written, and if the last two digits aren’t “00” they are supposed to be pronounced individually.
4:45pm = 1645 = “Sixteen Four Five hours”. (Or “Fooor fife” if you’re a pedant about radios.)
That’s all well and good trivia, in practice it’s usually said “Sixteen forty five” because yeah ain’t nobody got time for all that.
As a fairly-new ham radio operator, I need to improve my numbers pronunciation so maybe I’ll start reading the time like that and see how other people react.
Already, I get a number of confused-then-resigned looks when saying “sixteen o’clock” haha
I’ve heard the same with regards to proper military time not having the colon.
In Switzerland it works like that too.
“Normal time” for us is 24h with colon so 18:00
While “Military time” is without colon, so 1800 and is then pronounced as achtzehnhundert (eighteen hundred).
We don’t use colons in our time in the American hospital system. We use them for a lot of other things though. (Pun)
It took me a second to realise what the pun was…
as an american i must say i HATE this as well. people ask me why i use military time and i say it’s because there are 24 hours in the day so it makes much more sense to me. and that in other parts of the world they call it international time with the military having nothing to do with it.
makes me wanna scream. thank you for letting me go off.
Knowing Americans they would’ve rejected it if it wasn’t called military time. In fact I reckon if you guys rebranded metric system to military measurements there might be more acceptance to it.
You tried…
I keep telling people metric time is where it’s at but they just look at me like I’m crazy
obviously we should all just switch to metric time lmao
Time is not metric
Just to be devil’s advocate:
Time is not really not metric, either, to be absolutely fair. The 60/60/24 thing is mostly just a continuation of the sexagesimal system used by the Babylonians.
There are also plenty of instances in history where civilizations used a decimal system of timekeeping. Just a summary of the Wikipedia page on the matter below:
- Egypt: used in astronomy, the decade, equal to 10 days, with 36 decades per solar year, with an added 5 intercalary days at the end.
- China: the shi and ke, equal to 1/10 of a solar day & 1/100 solar day, respectively, though this has gone in and out of favor with and without modifications due to China having a long-ass (and thus varied) history.
- Revolutionary France: 10 days per week, 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute. (Although, to be fair, most common people ignored it and just used the sexagesimal time base they had always been used to. Lol.)
Alternatively, if you make the decimal second equal to 0.8640… SI seconds, then that would allow you to have 100 seconds per minute, 100 minutes per hour, 10 hours per day, and still have clocks align with the solar day.
Hell, even our definition of the second is merely the number of “pulses” (word used for brevity’s sake) of the Cesium-133 atom that corresponds to how long our second is. In other words, our definition of the second isn’t based on objective truth; we just found an objective way to define the system we already use. Lol.
Mind you, I’m merely playing devil’s advocate here. As much as I love the SI, and the metric system in general (both modern and previous versions), and would not be opposed to switching to decimal time if mandated, I’m okay with the system we have now. I JUST FUCKING WISH WE ALL USED 24H FORMAT GODDAMMIT THE AMBIGUITY OF 12H TIME PISSES ME OFF JUST FUCKING WHY GODDAMN IT nearby explosive barrel explodes from proximity to blood vessels
tl’dr: Our conception of time as sexagesimal, and even based on the Cs-133 atom, is not quite as objectively based as one might be led to think. Also, fuck 12h time.
Edit: There are 36 “decades” per solar year, not 3. Lol.
I remember hearing an anecdote that (I forget which band) got signed because they misunderstood the record producer when they requested a demo at 8 and showed up ready to play psychedelic rock at 8oclock in the fuckin morning
Good comment. Thanks!
Isn’t the second defined by light traveling a specific distance in vacuum?
To add to that, I wish we all just used UTC. Time zones are useless, we could all just adjust to the universal time in local schedules.
Also: english could be renamed to common and it would make sense.
Isn’t the second defined by light traveling a specific distance in vacuum?
If we were to redefine the second as 0.864 SI seconds, then the new second would be defined as the time it takes light to travel 0.864x the current meter. Of course since the modern definition of the meter is defined as a light-second, changing the definition of the second would also change the definition of a meter. (One thread loose pulls another thread loose and all that jazz…) My point being that these are merely objective ways to define the units we already use, not objective proofs of said units.
To add to that, I wish we all just used UTC. Time zones are useless, we could all just adjust to the universal time in local schedules.
Although that would be absolutely fantastic in my opinion, there are uses to time zones. Most people’s sleep cycles are naturally calibrated to light levels, which vary from time zone to time zone. Originally, time zones were split into equal divisions of latitude across the globe 15° apart, for this exact reason, it being the most logical way to divide them by.
What I just want is nations to stop fucking this up by using nationality and cultural reasons to have vastly separate areas abide by the same time zones. I mean, for fuck’s sake, here is what they used to look like; here is what they are now. Good gods is that a complete clusterfuck… I mean, seriously, China used to be four time zones; now they’re one!
If we just used UTC people on Europe could sleep from 23:00 to 7:00, people from Japan could sleep from 15:00 to 22:00 and so on. There would be no need to “localize” time.
I suppose.
changing the value of a second is not really feasible nowadays, so instead i would propose to just remove minutes and hours, and use seconds, hectoseconds and kiloseconds
Pshh I bet you use acoustic time.
What?
Not sure if you’ve had the same experience but I had an American colleague ask me what I meant when I didn’t give the time in the 12hr format. The message was something like, “I’ve booked the meeting for 14:00”
I’m American but work on transportation where 24hr clock is…sort of the standard.
I prefer 24hr and use it on all my devices, but outside work I pretty much exclusively communicate with 12 hr. No point in using wording I know is gonna be misunderstood when I can comfortably swap between the two.
Similar things happen to me. All of my devices are in Spanish in addition to 24hr, so anything automated is sent in Spanish to my non speaking colleagues
Americans are stupid when it comes to converting 24hrs “Militery time” to 1 pm, 2 pm, ext. making them all confused.
Ignorance is not stupidity.
Different places have different cultures and traditions. In the US, 12hr time is standard. 24hr time is used mostly by the military.
There are certainly arguments for why 24hr time is a better system. That doesn’t make it stupid to continue to use a slightly inferior system. Most cultures don’t try to adapt best practices from around the world.
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My company used to always use 24hr time when we were using a DOS based system. Then we upgraded to Windows Server 2009 and everything changed to 12hr. I preferred the 24hr. There were less mistakes.
*fewer
*Smellfungus
24h
It’s just another term for it. 🤷♂️
Just remember, civilian Americans aren’t the one who named the time system that includes “Oh Six Hundred Hours” Military Time. It was the Goddamned Military. And when the Goddamned Military fucking tells you what something is called, you fucking call it that. No questions.
So we could flip our clock displays to 24 hour time and meet at 14 o’clock, but we’d still be civilians and unworthy to use Military Time. So why bother? Working 9 to 5 is bad enough, working 9 to 17 sounds too fucking exhausting.
Wow, 9-17 really does sound like a long fucking day, whereas 9-5 sounds way shorter.
But they’re both the same and both far too much time spent at work.
8 hours vs. -4 hours. I know what shift I’m picking, suckers.
Joke’s on you, have fun with your 20 hours shifts.
0900-1700
The military have longer days than us plebs. They have twenty-four hundred hours when we get a measly twenty-four.
Unfair.
Military time chart is common because there is less confusion on what time something starts or ends. Why is just because people that use it are usually connected to the military in some way.
Local or Zulu?
