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So I gather that from 10:59 pm, we can get to 11:59 pm by passing one hour, but if we pass one more minute, to get to 12:00 pm we need to go backwards 12 hours, since going forward one minute will take us to 12:00 am. Written by Owen Vickery for EnglishClub June 2020īetter to use 12noon or 12midnight, to clarify the time,instead 12am or 12pm,that’s all. What time is it ? It’s almost 10 o’clock. We arrived just before / just after 8 o’clock. I eat in the morning / afternoon / evening. To finish, here are some key words (highlighted in bold) that can be useful when telling the time, some of which we’ve already seen : They’ll be arriving at about 7:30 Friday evening. His plane leaves at 8:15 tomorrow morning. Is that am or pm ? Planes leave at both those times. Sometimes, such sentences can be unclear : The film starts at 7:45 – films are usually shown in the afternoons and evenings so it’s 7:45pm. We’ve got a team meeting at 2:15 – a team meeting implies a work situation, people do work shifts but we can be reasonably sure it’s in the afternoon. I usually have breakfast at about 6:30 – we have breakfast in the morning. More often than not, it’s clear if we are talking about the morning or the afternoon. In practice, that means counting the hours from 1 to 12 in the morning and in the afternoon. In general conversations and situations in English, we use the 12-hour clock format. In English, do we use the 12-hour clock or 24-hour clock ? In other words, do we say for example 2pm or 14:00 ?

The last bus arrives just before midnight on Friday nights. I should be home by midnight Saturday night. There is some debate about this so it’s better to be clear from the outset, for example: Is that at the beginning or at the end of Sunday?! When we talk about midnight last night or midnight tonight, the meaning is clear but less so when we talk about, for example, midnight on Sunday.

Others will say this doesn’t make sense as noon can be neither am (before noon) or pm (after noon)! Some will say midnight is 12am, and therefore that midday (or noon) is 12pm. Is it the night between Monday and Tuesday or between Tuesday and Wednesday ? Midnight and midday OK, but what if someone talks about something happening at midnight on Tuesday? Is that 12am or 12pm. So returning to the question about the difference between 8am and 8pm: Pm = post meridiem (between midday and midnight) So what is am & pm?įirst of all, what do am and pm actually mean? Both come from Latin originally:Īm = ante meridiem (between midnight and midday) We will also see some other useful words and phrases that can crop up when we need to tell the time, or ask what the time is. That’s what we’ll be looking at in this article. 12 o’clock: we all know there are two a day – one at lunchtime and one at night – but which one is 12am and which one is 12pm?