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The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language states "By convention, 12 AM denotes midnight and 12 PM denotes noon. Because of the potential for confusion, it is advisable to use 12 noon and 12 midnight". [34] E. G. Richards in his book Mapping Time (1999) provided a diagram in which 12 a.m. means noon and 12 p.m. means midnight. [35]
Midnight at Metz railway station, in France. Midnight is the transition time from one day to the next – the moment when the date changes, on the local official clock time for any particular jurisdiction. By clock time, midnight is the opposite of noon, differing from it by 12 hours.
Where the a.m.–p.m. convention is inconvenient typographically (e.g., in dense tables), different fonts or colors are sometimes used instead. The most common usage in transport timetables for air, rail, bus, etc. is to use lightface for a.m. times and boldface for p.m. times. It is also not uncommon for AM and PM to be shortened to A and P.
That’s why, in the 12-hour system, all times from midnight onward use this designation. PM stands for “post meridiem,” meaning “after noon” or “after midday,” and as such applies to ...
(for meridiem, literally 12:00 midday), 12 p.m. (for post meridiem, literally "after midday"), 12 pm, or 12:00 (using a 24-hour clock) or 1200 (military time). Solar noon is the time when the Sun appears to contact the local celestial meridian .
The daytime canonical hours of the Catholic Church take their names from the Roman clock: the prime, terce, sext and none occur during the first (prīma) = 6 am, third (tertia) = 9 am, sixth (sexta) = 12 pm, and ninth (nōna) = 3 pm, hours of the day. The English term noon is also derived from the ninth hour.
In the 24-hour time notation, the day begins at midnight, 00:00 or 0:00, and the last minute of the day begins at 23:59. Where convenient, the notation 24:00 may also be used to refer to midnight at the end of a given date [3] — that is, 24:00 of one day is the same time as 00:00 of the following day.
So if you define midday -- or even noon, for that matter -- as when the sun crosses the meridian, then you need to know that this pretty much never happens at 12:00 civil time (see Equation of Time), hence invalidating the reasoning of the argument that 12 am and 12 pm are ambiguous. And not only is 12 am defined to be midnight and 12 pm ...