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The 12-hour clock is a time convention in which the 24 hours of the day are divided into two periods: a.m. (from Latin ante meridiem, translating to "before midday") and p.m. (from Latin post meridiem, translating to "after midday").
The AM/PM system actually does have a specific abbreviation for noon—just the letter “M,” short for “meridiem,” which would come after “12” and only refer to noon. Haven’t heard of it?
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.
Punctuation and spacing styles differ, even within English-speaking countries (6:30 p.m., 6:30 pm, 6:30 PM, 6.30pm, etc.). [ citation needed ] Most people who live in countries that use one of the clocks dominantly are still able to understand both systems without much confusion; the statements "three o'clock" and "15:00", for example, are ...
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.
Date and time notation in Italy records the date using the day–month–year format (7 febbraio 2025 or 7/2/2025). The time is written using the 24-hour clock (19:11); in spoken language and informal contexts, the 12-hour clock is more commonly adopted, but without using "a.m." or "p.m." suffixes (7:11).
When the time is expressed in the HH:MM:SS notation, the Roman ante/post-meridiem indicators (AM and PM) are also used frequently. In addition, they sometimes follow the convention of writing the Korean-style indicator before the time; it is not uncommon to encounter times expressed in such a way, e.g., “ AM 9:18 ” instead of “ 9:18 AM ”.
Dutch TV listings magazines invariably use 24-hour notation. In written language, time is expressed in the 24-hour notation, with or without leading zero, using a full stop or colon as a separator, sometimes followed by the word uur (hour) or its abbreviation u. – for example, 22.51 uur, 9.12 u., or 09:12.