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.
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.
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?
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”.
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.
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.”
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.)
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.
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”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.
1400 (fourteen hundred)
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.
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. 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.
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.
Watch officers HATE this one ambiguous millitary time/dating convention
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”?
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
Zero-Dark-Thirty