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.
In the US, the 12-hour clock format is in widespread use, except in the military. That is why it’s called like that.
It’s interesting that it’s not as widespread amongst the public.As far as I know, the rest of the world either uses it or is able to understand it whereas I’ve had the opposite with Americans. I’m a very limited sample size though.
Americans understand it just fine.
Just like I understand what a meter is, but in real life, I would NEVER use the meter as a unit of measurement.
Yeah, I know metric is the better system, I agree. This isn’t about that. It’s about saying something and not making the listener take a moment to convert it into how they relate to the world.
Americans do not understand it just fine. I’ve had my phone on 24h time for years and the amount of fellow Americans who are completely baffled by it baffles me.
Look up the “theory of American exceptionalism”. In short there is a very strong belief here that America is one of a kind and things that may work for others simply don’t apply here.
Explains why the US stocks a 12hr clock, messed up month/day/year mission, imperial measurement and a ton of other things that any foreigner will find anywhere from quirky to infuriating.
IMHO the exceptionalism theory is a b.s. lazy way of keeping things conservative and unchanged and shutting down any discussion of uncomfortable progress.
There was a theory I read at one point, that for the life of me I can’t remember the name of, that basically described a generalized form of exceptionalism, but for different categories.
Basically, the “most something” countries in any particular category are going to have exceptional circumstances that make what other countries do not always apply.
India, having the largest population, faces demographic problems that solutions that work in the Netherlands just can’t address.
Same with Russian transportation infrastructure, and ultimately American economic issues.
“American Exceptionalism” also known as “Europeans are obsessed with America and can’t understand why American’s don’t follow their orders, meanwhile the Danes count like Barbarians and the UK hasn’t picked a system”
It’s standard in Canada as well. I prefer 24hr personally. There were a couple times where I’ve napped in the evening, and woke up thinking I was late for work in the morning. Not fun. 24hr clock solves that. Plus it just makes more sense to me than 12hr clocks.
I have no strong opinion but I’ll give some reasons that people don’t often consider.
Analog clocks are often easier to understand visually for people. A typical person will be awake for 16ish hours of the day. Which means that when looking at an analog 12 hour clock, you can easily see where you’re at in your day. That is both harder to do on an analog 24 hour clock and it also doesn’t make sense because you won’t really ever see 1/3rd of the clock get used. Military is forced to use it because the time is all digits which makes confusion less possible and displaying it easier.
When talking about the digital version, again, it reflects how humans experience time easier. Again consider using a clock in which you will not typically see or use a third of the numbers for anything. Why do that?
I think a lot of what bugs us about these two systems is the zero points. If I could redo it, I’d put 12am to line up and make 6am noon. Then 6pm is now evening/night.
I suggest that because the current 12hr systems are set up to benefit capitalism. It’s meant to make you forget how long you’re working in the US. And telling people that waking up at 5am to do stuff is morning is also stupid. It’s still night time at that time and our clocks don’t reflect that at all.
It’s definitely not standard in Canada. I wish it was. Every time I buy something, I have to figure out how to swap it to 24h mode.
It’s veeeeery not standard in Canada. I use it on my phone and most people who see it on the lockscreen treat me like I’m an alien, and it’s about a 50/50 mix of people who simply think 24 hour time is weird (but at least recognize it) vs. people who seem genuinely baffled by the digits they see appearing on my phone and don’t even seem to recognize it as a time at all.
You’d think 24 hour watches would be more common than they are especially among European watches.
My kid had the hardest time reading a 12 hour clock. I think am/pm is too abstract for young kids. 24 hour makes more intuitive sense. The number resets only at the end of the day.
There is a cultural phenomenon called schismogenesis - the tendency for one culture to define itself by how it differs from other cultures around it. Even in cases where the culture Y approach is “better” by whatever metric, culture X people will reject it because it’s a Y thing and not an X thing. I see the US rejection of the metric system under Reagan being the most glaringly obvious example of this, but the time thing is probably part of it, too.
I just really wish we hadn’t gone with the whole base 60 system in the first place.
Why the hate for base 60? It has its roots in Babylon and also forms the basis for angles in geometry.
Because the average American is much more likely to bump into American military personnel than people from countries that use 24 hour time. It’s really as simple as that.
And this isn’t because we’re uncultured swine, it’s because we’re separated by two oceans from most countries.
Which is a few countries south of the US and connected to NA by a nearly impassible forest and no roads… Might as well be another ocean.
The entire US logistics chain runs on 24 hour time, even the 100% domestic aspects.
The logistics chain would also save tens of billions of dollars in lost revenue every year if we ended daylight savings time and time zones, and collectively is one of the biggest lobbies for those changes
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
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 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 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.)
They say fourteen hundred or 2 o’clock. I’ve never really heard anyone say 14 o’clock.
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.
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.
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.
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”?
Given how they use different systems to measure almost everything than the rest of the world, I’d say I’m OK with them not using the 24h format, I’d expect them to use something like the 27 American hours, divided in 109 minutes of 31 seconds each.
The freedom clock, where hours are called “freedoms”, minutes are called “stars” and seconds are called “stripes”.
Its because in America most people’s only experience with it is when the movie says “meet here at 0700 hrs.” Really isn’t much deeper than that, we also call “ranger green” “ranger green” whether an army ranger is wearing it or not, despite it really being “just a shade of green.” Sometimes things are just called things.
If this was a case of things just being called things, it would be its own word. For example, a door is called a door because things are just called things. But military time is obviously a reference to something entirely different, that doesn’t actually have anything to do with time. So there’s more to it than just being called that.
Ranger green is called like that, because it’s the shade of green rangers wear. And not “just because”. Same with military time. It’s called like that because people associate it with military, be it from seeing it in military movies, or by using it in the military themselves.
“Ranger Green” the hell is that?
I’m an army veteran and I’ve never heard that term. Army Green, yes, but that’s pretty rare, too.
What color even is “Ranger Green” other than OD?
