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I get the impression Americans don't use 24-hour clock much. In Europe it's pretty much standard if you want to communicate time reliably. Or am I mistaken abou

I get the impression Americans don't use 24-hour clock much. In Europe it's pretty much standard if you want to communicate time reliably. Or am I mistaken about the American love of am/pm?

emodendroket 10y ago
People use the term "military time" interchangeably with "24-hour clock" if that helps.
- w-ll 10y ago
  People do, but also people might not. I can see offering the same setting but with two different labels, or like in a dropdown.
arcticfox 10y ago
You're correct. We call the 24-hour clock "military time" and basically no one uses it casually.
- iamdave 10y ago
  I do. Granted, I was in the military-I passively hate it when people call it 'military time' (passively meaning I mentally roll my eyes when someone says it), but I've been using it since middle school when I first even learned it was a thing. Mostly because it made sense right away. There are 24 hours in the day. Why are we recycling numbers in our time system? No really, why?
  - RubyPinch 10y ago
    at a guess, its kinda the key size for hours 12/2=6, 12/3=4 work well, (with /4 and /6 being repeats of those) 24 hours doesn't add much on top of those divisions (you get /4 with a repeating /6 I guess)
    - iamdave 10y ago
      I'm not immediately understanding, what are the divisions for? Parts/portions of the day?
  - roel_v 10y ago
    Because there are only 12 major divisions on a clock. An analog clock, that is. It reads the same at 3am and 3pm. So from that pov it only makes sense to call it the same.
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      There are also analog clocks with 24 divisions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_analog_dial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_analog_dial I guess 12 hour clocks are an easy trick to make them easier to read and manufacture and so on.
      - roel_v 10y ago
        Sure, as a novelty. Who here has ever seen one like that in the wild? And yes, I think 24 is much harder to read, and not necessary either - in those situations where you don't know (when looking at a clock) whether it's 3am or 3pm, you have much bigger issues to worry about :)
        maxerickson 10y ago
        My point was more in the second para, that 12 hour clocks aren't a platonic ideal, they are likely a result of practical demands. We make 12 hour dials rather than having them thrust upon us.
        jwhitlark 10y ago
        James Burke said in one of his shows that the 12 hour clock came in because it was ridiculous to have clock tower bells strike 24.
        TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
        I was wondering what the rationale was.
        grkvlt 10y ago
  - wott 10y ago
    > Why are we recycling numbers in our time system? Ever tried to read the clock on a sundial at night?
  - pasquinelli 10y ago
    maybe it has something to do with sundials.
  - ska 10y ago
    So that kids learn modular arithmetic ?
ci5er 10y ago
Your impression is pretty much spot on. We have "military-time" and "24-hour time" available to us in all of our application configurations, but no-one seems to use it. I do because it helps me do time-zone translating transforms to/from UTC in my head more easily, but also because I keep failing to see that little "PM dot" or set the "PM Flag" whenever dealing with times in various applications or alarms. Verbally, speaking with USians, 15.00 is always pronounced "3pm".
- roel_v 10y ago
  "Verbally, speaking with USians, 15.00 is always pronounced "3pm"." It's like that everywhere in Europe. Nobody says 'see you at fifteen'. 24 hour clock is merely for writing things down. I mean it would already be an improvement if the US would catch up with that, just saying that a 24 hour clock isn't said out loud as such. (not disagreeing or anything with you I guess, just adding some information).
  - detaro 10y ago
    Let's meet at 15 o'clock" or "When do you go for lunch?" "thirteen-thirty" is totally daily usage in some places/groups (possibly age-related, since digital clocks here are always 24h and younger generations had more relative exposure to them)
  - axlee 10y ago
    > It's like that everywhere in Europe. Nobody says 'see you at fifteen'. Not really? In France it's perfectly normal to say "Rendez-vous à quinze heures" or "Le film commence à vingt-deux heures trente"
    - roel_v 10y ago
      OK, it might be a social construct. I'd never say 'treize heures' to set a time with my Parisian colleagues, and neither would they (to the best of my recollection). Sometimes people would say it, yes, but it'd sound strangely artificial, like read literally from a schedule - which in many cases it would be.
dcosson 10y ago
Unlike most of the imperial system, farenheit, etc, Am/pm seems to actually make some sense with analog clocks/watches. In places where you primarily use 24 hour time I guess you're always just translating from the clock in your head?
- edoceo 10y ago
  Nope, cause everyone around means 15, when they say 15. And everyone "gets" that all numbers after 12 are late-day. 15 only is odd if someone else is expecting to hear 3p
- wtbob 10y ago
  Or you just have a secondary dial. The watch I'm wearing right now has a major 1-12 dial and a secondary 13-24 dial. But my other watch has a 1-12 dial and a secondary 1-24 dial, with a funky secondary hour hand, so perhaps I'm weird:-)
- 3chelon 10y ago
  I suppose having grown up with 24-hour digital clocks since they first appeared in the 1970s, and most of the clocks around the house and on various devices being 24-hour digital, and using public transport which operates in 24-hour time, there is no "translation" that occurs, most Europeans are simply bilingual in 12/24 hour times. 1745 to me just means what 5:45pm means to you, but I never translate it in my head. In fact, if I'm texting someone older who I think might not naturally use 24-hour time, I have to translate to 12-hour time and it always feels odd to write the am/pm suffix.
sandworm101 10y ago
American English is all about factions. The use of 24hour time gives the impression that the speaker has ties to the military, which is a rather high percentage of the US population. I've had several people correct my use of 24-hour time (ie 0945) as being "dramatic" and that 9:45am is more "friendly". I had one person comment after a talk I gave (lots of slides with timestamps) that they thought I was talking down to the many military and former military people in the room. But the slides were originally created for Canadian university students. I'd used them several times north of the boarder. There, nobody noticed the timestamps as anything other than functional. Whatever you do, don't mention metric time in the US. The 10-hour days and 100-day months that we find so normal drives them insane.
- jhbadger 10y ago
  You are joking, but the French revolutionaries really tried to introduce 10 hour days (with a different value of "hour" obviously) broken into 100 minutes each (again not our minute) along with their new calendar.
  - sandworm101 10y ago
    They did that to break the control of the church, to do away with sundays. I've run into a couple people who still support the concept. I know one ardent atheist who doesn't like that we name days after Norse gods. Similarly, when I lived in the middle east some chuckled at the concept of an Islamic nation using pagan names on calenders. They don't want a 10-hour day, but both want to break from the old dogma.
    - seszett 10y ago
      > They did that to break the control of the church, to do away with sundays. That was just an added bonus for the democratically elected Parliament to accept it, but it wasn't the initial reason. Decimal time had mostly been pushed by mathematicians (d'Alembert decades before the Revolution, Borda who was the real ), and much later Poincaré, while the most important proponents of the decimal calendar were Romme and Dupuis (very far from being an atheist! though not a fervent Catholic either indeed) and respected scientists such as Lagrange and Monge. The first and foremost reason was doing away with old arbitrary customs associated with the monarchy and replacing them with standards grounded into more universal, less arbitrary references. That's the only reason I support it, for my part, and I doubt anyone in France cares now about having weekdays named after Roman gods. Even at the time of the Revolution I believe these names would actually have been somewhat appealing, as classical culture was seen then as a model with which to replace the despised monarchy and religious oppression.
lucideer 10y ago
I find this comment unexpected, being Irish, as I would've associated the attachment to 12 hour intervals much more with here than with the US. But I guess it's a British colonial throwback thing; I'd be curious to hear of au/nz/ca/za/in/etc. habits.
- knz 10y ago
  24 hour time isn't unheard of in New Zealand but most people would use 12 hour time.
- sdm 10y ago
  For Canada: In Quebec, the 24 hour clock is the norm. Outside of Quebec, the 12 hour clock is the majority but a significant minority use the 24 hour clock. Everyone understands the 24 hour clock in my experience though.

I get the impression Americans don't use 24-hour clock much. In Europe it's pretty much standard if you want to communicate time reliably. Or am I mistaken about the American love of am/pm?

emodendroket 10y ago

People use the term "military time" interchangeably with "24-hour clock" if that helps.

w-ll 10y ago
People do, but also people might not. I can see offering the same setting but with two different labels, or like in a dropdown.

arcticfox 10y ago

You're correct. We call the 24-hour clock "military time" and basically no one uses it casually.

iamdave 10y ago
I do. Granted, I was in the military-I passively hate it when people call it 'military time' (passively meaning I mentally roll my eyes when someone says it), but I've been using it since middle school when I first even learned it was a thing. Mostly because it made sense right away. There are 24 hours in the day. Why are we recycling numbers in our time system? No really, why?
- RubyPinch 10y ago
  at a guess, its kinda the key size for hours 12/2=6, 12/3=4 work well, (with /4 and /6 being repeats of those) 24 hours doesn't add much on top of those divisions (you get /4 with a repeating /6 I guess)
  - iamdave 10y ago
    I'm not immediately understanding, what are the divisions for? Parts/portions of the day?
- roel_v 10y ago
  Because there are only 12 major divisions on a clock. An analog clock, that is. It reads the same at 3am and 3pm. So from that pov it only makes sense to call it the same.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    There are also analog clocks with 24 divisions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_analog_dial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_analog_dial I guess 12 hour clocks are an easy trick to make them easier to read and manufacture and so on.
    - roel_v 10y ago
      Sure, as a novelty. Who here has ever seen one like that in the wild? And yes, I think 24 is much harder to read, and not necessary either - in those situations where you don't know (when looking at a clock) whether it's 3am or 3pm, you have much bigger issues to worry about :)
      - maxerickson 10y ago
        My point was more in the second para, that 12 hour clocks aren't a platonic ideal, they are likely a result of practical demands. We make 12 hour dials rather than having them thrust upon us.
        jwhitlark 10y ago
        James Burke said in one of his shows that the 12 hour clock came in because it was ridiculous to have clock tower bells strike 24.
        TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
        I was wondering what the rationale was.
        grkvlt 10y ago
- wott 10y ago
  > Why are we recycling numbers in our time system? Ever tried to read the clock on a sundial at night?
- pasquinelli 10y ago
  maybe it has something to do with sundials.
- ska 10y ago
  So that kids learn modular arithmetic ?

ci5er 10y ago

Your impression is pretty much spot on. We have "military-time" and "24-hour time" available to us in all of our application configurations, but no-one seems to use it. I do because it helps me do time-zone translating transforms to/from UTC in my head more easily, but also because I keep failing to see that little "PM dot" or set the "PM Flag" whenever dealing with times in various applications or alarms. Verbally, speaking with USians, 15.00 is always pronounced "3pm".

roel_v 10y ago
"Verbally, speaking with USians, 15.00 is always pronounced "3pm"." It's like that everywhere in Europe. Nobody says 'see you at fifteen'. 24 hour clock is merely for writing things down. I mean it would already be an improvement if the US would catch up with that, just saying that a 24 hour clock isn't said out loud as such. (not disagreeing or anything with you I guess, just adding some information).
- detaro 10y ago
  Let's meet at 15 o'clock" or "When do you go for lunch?" "thirteen-thirty" is totally daily usage in some places/groups (possibly age-related, since digital clocks here are always 24h and younger generations had more relative exposure to them)
- axlee 10y ago
  > It's like that everywhere in Europe. Nobody says 'see you at fifteen'. Not really? In France it's perfectly normal to say "Rendez-vous à quinze heures" or "Le film commence à vingt-deux heures trente"
  - roel_v 10y ago
    OK, it might be a social construct. I'd never say 'treize heures' to set a time with my Parisian colleagues, and neither would they (to the best of my recollection). Sometimes people would say it, yes, but it'd sound strangely artificial, like read literally from a schedule - which in many cases it would be.

dcosson 10y ago

Unlike most of the imperial system, farenheit, etc, Am/pm seems to actually make some sense with analog clocks/watches. In places where you primarily use 24 hour time I guess you're always just translating from the clock in your head?

edoceo 10y ago
Nope, cause everyone around means 15, when they say 15. And everyone "gets" that all numbers after 12 are late-day. 15 only is odd if someone else is expecting to hear 3p
wtbob 10y ago
Or you just have a secondary dial. The watch I'm wearing right now has a major 1-12 dial and a secondary 13-24 dial. But my other watch has a 1-12 dial and a secondary 1-24 dial, with a funky secondary hour hand, so perhaps I'm weird:-)
3chelon 10y ago
I suppose having grown up with 24-hour digital clocks since they first appeared in the 1970s, and most of the clocks around the house and on various devices being 24-hour digital, and using public transport which operates in 24-hour time, there is no "translation" that occurs, most Europeans are simply bilingual in 12/24 hour times. 1745 to me just means what 5:45pm means to you, but I never translate it in my head. In fact, if I'm texting someone older who I think might not naturally use 24-hour time, I have to translate to 12-hour time and it always feels odd to write the am/pm suffix.

sandworm101 10y ago

American English is all about factions. The use of 24hour time gives the impression that the speaker has ties to the military, which is a rather high percentage of the US population. I've had several people correct my use of 24-hour time (ie 0945) as being "dramatic" and that 9:45am is more "friendly". I had one person comment after a talk I gave (lots of slides with timestamps) that they thought I was talking down to the many military and former military people in the room. But the slides were originally created for Canadian university students. I'd used them several times north of the boarder. There, nobody noticed the timestamps as anything other than functional. Whatever you do, don't mention metric time in the US. The 10-hour days and 100-day months that we find so normal drives them insane.

jhbadger 10y ago
You are joking, but the French revolutionaries really tried to introduce 10 hour days (with a different value of "hour" obviously) broken into 100 minutes each (again not our minute) along with their new calendar.
- sandworm101 10y ago
  They did that to break the control of the church, to do away with sundays. I've run into a couple people who still support the concept. I know one ardent atheist who doesn't like that we name days after Norse gods. Similarly, when I lived in the middle east some chuckled at the concept of an Islamic nation using pagan names on calenders. They don't want a 10-hour day, but both want to break from the old dogma.
  - seszett 10y ago
    > They did that to break the control of the church, to do away with sundays. That was just an added bonus for the democratically elected Parliament to accept it, but it wasn't the initial reason. Decimal time had mostly been pushed by mathematicians (d'Alembert decades before the Revolution, Borda who was the real ), and much later Poincaré, while the most important proponents of the decimal calendar were Romme and Dupuis (very far from being an atheist! though not a fervent Catholic either indeed) and respected scientists such as Lagrange and Monge. The first and foremost reason was doing away with old arbitrary customs associated with the monarchy and replacing them with standards grounded into more universal, less arbitrary references. That's the only reason I support it, for my part, and I doubt anyone in France cares now about having weekdays named after Roman gods. Even at the time of the Revolution I believe these names would actually have been somewhat appealing, as classical culture was seen then as a model with which to replace the despised monarchy and religious oppression.

lucideer 10y ago

I find this comment unexpected, being Irish, as I would've associated the attachment to 12 hour intervals much more with here than with the US. But I guess it's a British colonial throwback thing; I'd be curious to hear of au/nz/ca/za/in/etc. habits.

knz 10y ago
24 hour time isn't unheard of in New Zealand but most people would use 12 hour time.
sdm 10y ago
For Canada: In Quebec, the 24 hour clock is the norm. Outside of Quebec, the 12 hour clock is the majority but a significant minority use the 24 hour clock. Everyone understands the 24 hour clock in my experience though.