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?
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??
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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.
I did some research, and AM means Ante Meridiem (latin for before noon) and PM means Post Meridiem (after noon). Which makes sense for the most part, because 4 AM means the 4th hour in Ante Meridiem, and 8 PM means the 8th hour in Post Meridiem, etc.. It follows a chronological order from 1AM to 11AM, but then at noon it swaps to 12PM, then 1PM to 11 PM, then it swaps to 12 AM again. It's strange, because if you follow the logic of the other hours, 12 PM should mean the 12th hour in Post Meridiem, when it's really the first hour in Post Meridiem. 12 PM sounds like it should be 12 hours after noon, when in reality it is noon.
Why is this the case? It seems counter-intuitive, especially because I grew up with a 24-hour system in Denmark. We just say 19 o'clock when it's 7 PM.
11PM is at night but 12PM is in the middle of the day. What the hell?
They seem reversed to me. It goes 10 pm, 11pm, 12 am, 1 am. Why wouldnt it go 10 pm, 11pm 12pm, 1am?
its probably easier to see why when you use a 24 hour clock. midnight is 00:00, clearly the start of the new day. 01:00 marks 1 hour passing of the new day, not the start of the 1st hour. the same way we count birthdays starting at 0 not 1, 1 year old means 1 year has passed.
12:00 is the middle of the day and marks the begining of the 2nd half of the day going until 23:59:59. when it goes from 23:59 to 00:00 it makes a lot of sense since its the end of one day and the start of the next. so therefore when you convert it to the 12 hour clock, going from 11:59pm of the previous day to 12:00am of the next is the logical flow
The 12 hour clock divides the day into two periods before noon (ante meridiem/a.m.) and after noon (post meridiem/p.m.). Twelve noon is technically neither a.m. nor p.m. and it never came up until we started making digital clocks. We chose to make it p.m. because the second that follows it is p.m.
When someone says “I have a flight to catch on Monday at midnight.” do they mean the 12am between Sunday and Monday, or the 12am between Monday and Tuesday?
I think it depends on what time does the day actually start. I believe it’s 12:00am. So I’m thinking “on Monday at midnight” is the beginning of the day on Monday right after Sunday. But it sounds weird because the word “midnight” seems to have a very late connotation to it rather than actually being early. I’m not sure, but I would think that’s why actual flight times never fall on 12:00 on the dot to avoid confusion.
so if 12:00 anything is midnight then the minute after is 12:01 but how could that be?! pretend it’s day 0 so if you wanted to be old timey you’d say it is the first minute of the twelfth hour ante meridian. but how could that be?
it is the 1st minute of day 1 not the last 59minutes of day 0. after midnight a new day starts (at least in christian tradition, I think hebrews do it differently).
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?
I keep getting different answers on google and I don’t know anymore. Is 12 pm midnight or is 12 am midnight. Idk anymore
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 <--??
Wouldn’t it make more sense? 10am, 11am, 12am, 1pm, 2pm, 3pm
Then AM and numbers would “reset” at the same time.
Is there a useful mnemonic? I always mix them up.