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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]
By clock time, midnight is the opposite of noon, differing from it by 12 hours. Solar midnight is the time opposite to solar noon, when the Sun is closest to the nadir, and the night is equidistant from sunset and sunrise. Due to the advent of time zones, which regularize time across a range of meridians, and daylight saving time, solar ...
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.
Midnight (12:00 am local official clock time) was also the sixth hour of the night, which, depending on summer or winter, can come before or after 12:00 am local official clock time, whereas the first hour of the night always begins after sunset, when the first three stars appeared in the night sky.
In common usage, a day starts at midnight, written as 00:00 or 12:00 am in 24-or 12-hour clocks, respectively. Because the time of midnight varies between locations, time zones are set up to facilitate the use of a uniform standard time.
The English term noon is also derived from the ninth hour. This was a period of prayer initially held at three in the afternoon but eventually moved back to midday for unknown reasons. [12] The change of meaning was complete by around 1300. [13] The terms a.m. and p.m. are still used in the 12-hour clock, as opposed to the 24-hour clock.
Every digital clock that uses am/pm assumes that 12:00 am is midnight and 12:00 pm is noon. It is the de facto convention, and rightly so. I have seen increasing use of 12:00 pm in signs and notices and such to mean noon and never the other way around. The American Heritage dictionary says 12:00 am is midnight and 12:00 pm is noon.
12 o'clock usually refers the time as shown on a 12-hour clock, either noon - 12 o'clock at daytime - or midnight - 12 o'clock at nighttime. 12 o'clock may also refer to: 12-hour clock, a time convention in which the 24 hours of the day are divided into two periods Noon, 12 o'clock in the daytime, as opposed to midnight