I was talking to a native speaker (American woman ) and she corrected me as I was talking to her that 12 PM is the one in the day time not 12 AM. I don’t know if I have had it wrong all my life or what.

As the title says. My daughter and I were having a conversation earlier, and she asked me to order something from Amazon; I was busy so I told her “please remind me this afternoon”. She responded by telling me it is already afternoon (it was 12:10pm). So this made me start to think about times of day and if there is a standard, so I googled it and that was useless because it was kind of all over the place or not specific enough… no real standard definition that I could find.

I would like to preface this by saying this is how I personally reference the different “time periods” throughout the day, it has nothing to do with any proper definitions or scientific research, this is just how I, myself, will reference the different time periods throughout the day :)

So I’m thinking maybe everyone kinda has their own personal “range” they use for specific times of the day? Anyway, I thought it would be fun to see what hours everyone else uses/considers to be morning/noon/afternoon/evening/night/early morning etc or whatever … so here’s mine:

Ok, so to me… (and this is just how I personally define the times of day, when I’m speaking about morning/noon/night etc) goes kind of like this:

morning is like 5am-12pm noon, noon is like 11am-1pm, afternoon is anytime between 1-5pm, evening is between 5-9pm, nighttime is after 9pm til like 2am, then it’s early morning from like 2-5am. So, for example, if it’s like 11am, and I ask my daughter “will you please remind me this afternoon”, I usually mean sometime between 1-3pm, but if I say “will you please remind me later this afternoon” that usually means anytime between 3-5ish pm.

am I psycho? Or does everyone have like a set period of time (in hours) that they kind of use to describe the times of day?

TLDR: What hours of the day do you consider when referencing the different time periods throughout a 24 hour period? For example: Morning/Noon/Afternoon/Evening/Night/Late Night/Early Morning

My uncle and I are arguing about whether 12 AM is considered morning or night. I'm not going to say which side I take so I don't skew the results. Hopefully y'all can solve this argument.

11PM is at night but 12PM is in the middle of the day. What the hell?

It feels backwards—12 noon is exactly halfway between midnights, but we call it PM. Wouldn’t it make more sense for 12 noon to be AM, since it’s before the second midnight?

Okay so first of all, I'm not from the US or UK, so I never used PM in my day to day life. I also believe that a 24 hour system is far superior to the AM PM system, so that isn't going to change my view. I also do not think changing the system this way now makes sense, as it would probably take too much effort.

What made me make this post is a viral Twitter image that made fun of people for not knowing which of four options are closest to midnight: 11:55 AM, 12:06 AM, 11:50 AM, 12:03 AM. The correct answer is D, but it confused a lot of people, and I can fully understand why.

My arguement for why it would make more sense to switch the two is that currently the morning times go: 12 1 2 3... 9, 10, 11. And then it switches to evening and once again starts with 12 and then 1. It would make a lot more sense to have it be 1 AM - 12 AM and then 1 PM - 12 PM. The only reasonable arguement I can see against this is that 12:30 PM would be in the next day so to speak, so it would make more sense to call ot AM. But then call it 0:30 AM to avoid the confusion of starting over. Is this just some ancient holdover from a numbering system that didn't have 0?

10am, 11am, 12pm <--??

11pm 12am 1am <--??

I'm always confused by the AM/PM-system. If I'm not mistaken the morning is AM, the afternoon/evening is PM.

But what about the edge-cases? Is midnight 12PM or is midnight 0AM?

Or are both correct?

And a similar question for noon, is that 12AM or 0PM?

They seem reversed to me. It goes 10 pm, 11pm, 12 am, 1 am. Why wouldnt it go 10 pm, 11pm 12pm, 1am?

Is 12 am at night or day? when exactly does am change to pm maybe there's a chart that could help me better understand it?

Is there a useful mnemonic? I always mix them up.

I'm in a debate with my friend please help me would you consider 2am to be morning or night?

I’m in the US. If that helps.

My wife gets on me sometimes because I go to bed at 12:30 or 1 or 1:30 and I say “goodnight” to her and she jokes “well technically it’s morning”. I try to argue that night technically is from sunset to sunrise but she says once the clock hits 12:01 am it’s morning and tells me to look up AM and PM. Help!

I feel like there's weird maths thing that makes this all make sense but i can't wrap my head around it.

Why is 12 am midnight?

I feel like that makes it really weird because it means that the am's go from 12am to 1 am to 2 am, etc and like shouldn't it start at 1 and go to 12? Same thing with the pm's like it goes from 11pm then 12am? Shouldn't it be 11pm then 12pm??

So in another post asking why people say 3am in the morning a commenter answered they use is to denote whether or not they have been to bed. Someone else answered that am is always morning. I would think morning begins at dawn. If it is dark out then it's still night. Which one is correct grammatically?

Hello, I’ve been struggling with understanding why noon is 12pm even though pm is at night. Makes no sense! Thank you!