What time is "afternoon" and when is "evening" ?
What times (hours) of day do you consider to be “morning”, afternoon”, “evening”, “night”, etc?
What period of the day do you consider to be “evening”?
word usage - the exact time of "evening" and "night" - English Language Learners Stack Exchange
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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
And does it change throughout the year?
I would say that the periods of a day are simply time periods. For example, the definition of morning time says it is:
the time period between dawn and noon
You could also call them periods. The definition of evening says:
- The period of decreasing daylight between afternoon and night.
- The period between sunset or the evening meal and bedtime: a quiet evening at home.
- A later period or time: in the evening of one's life.
Edit: A more specialized term, used in broadcast programming, is dayparting. That is,
In Broadcast programming, dayparting is the practice of dividing the day into several parts, during each of which a different type of radio programming or television programming apropos for that time is aired. Television programs are most often geared toward a particular demographic, and what the target audience typically engages in at that time. Arbitron, the leading audience measurement ratings service in the United States, divides a weekday into five dayparts: morning drive time (6-10 am), midday (10 am-3 pm), afternoon drive (3-7 pm), evenings (7 pm-12 midnight), and overnight (midnight-6 am; Arbitron generally does not measure during this time period).
You could adopt this term for the use you seek, although many people would not know its precise origin. The individual parts of the day could be termed dayparts.
"Dayparting" is probably the correct technical term, but it's not one I've come across before. More commonly, these are simply "times of day".
They are of course often used as greetings "[Good] Morning" / "[Good] Evening" etc., and the common expression for someone being rude enough not to exchange such a greeting is "[he/she] wouldn't give me the time of day".
Admittedly the "time of day" could also be interpreted as a reference to the exact time - but that is more commonly just referred to as "time".
I mean, you could be able to replace "morning" and "evening" with epithets: "early night" and "late night" respectfully, but I don't know what to do with "afternoon" (like: time at 1:30 am)
Well noon is midnight so there's no problum with that