Which 12 is pm

Alternatively, you could use the hour clock system, where is noon and or is midnight. At exactly 12 noon, the Sun is at its highest point in the sky and directly over the meridian. It is therefore neither 'ante' am nor 'post' pm meridiem. At 12 midnight it also neither am nor pm. If all these questions about time have got you in a spin, why not visit the Royal Observatory , where many more mysteries of time await Which years are leap years and can you have leap seconds?

Because the Earth takes a little over days to orbit the Sun, we need to make adjustments to keep the seasons from drifting: leap years and even leap seconds.

How do we divide time? While days and years are fairly neat astronomical events, what explains months, weeks, hours and minutes? Back to Research Ionising radiation Radiation dosimetry Nuclear metrology.

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Analytics cookies We utilise Google Analytics cookies to help us to improve our website by collecting information on how it's used. Home Resources Questions and answers Is midnight 12am or 12pm? Questions and answers Is midnight 12am or 12pm? Are the words noon, midday and midnight clearly understood? Midday and midnight conventions.

Try booking some meetings, lunches etc at Phil Benjamin, Enfield, Middx. Working on the hour clock meant that there was no difficulty with midday hours - but the Air Force could not countenance hours for midnight.

I am appaled at the rubbish I have read on this subject. There is no genuine confusion nor ambiguity only a self-made one. As the day begins at midnight, midnight must be 12am. The moment of noon is in the first second, consequently minute and hour of the afternoon therefore noon must be 12pm.

It is poppycock to say that 12am and 12pm do not exist by considering the moments of noon and midnight within their own right - once the measures they belong to become clear, any supposed confusion vanishes. However, for those who must use this notation, take a look at your digital clock dislay 12hr.

When it changes to 12 noon it shows 12pm! And at midnight 12am! So for you freaks that must use an ambiguous notation surely this is the very thing. Neither should be used. You should really pay attention to the abbreviation. Midnight would be 12am or 12pm either. By counting forwards then backwards in time, we might stop getting older. Absolutely the correct answer from Colin Jones, Aberdeen, Scotland. Midnight needing to be qualified further as the end or beginning of a particular day. Worldwide adoption of Stanley Sutcliffe, Halifax United Kingdom If we use the military time as our basis for this argument and for the sake of argument say that is midnight then we can simply answer this question using common sense math skills.

Do we start counting at 12 or 24? No we don't. Do we believe that there is actually a time known as Most people I know would say that this time does not exist or that doomsday is here if we were on that moment.

Therefore the day begins with where we naturally start counting from. Using this argument I believe 12 noon to be 12am as it is the end of the morning. If we take this to be true then we can see that military time as it is known uses because it is the end of that day and a full 24 hours otherwise why don't all of our clocks say My bank sent me a message this week asking me to pay in funds by 12pm on 12th June to avoid charges.

I paid in at 3. I called them and they have waived the charge, but still insist that 12pm is midday. John Griffiths, Norwich Norfolk Both 12am and 12pm are precise moments of time. Therefor 12am is midday and pm would start straight after.

The confusion has started since the invention of the digital clock. Well, I think of it this way: Midnight is an exact moment, the border, between the period of time after noon of the day ending pm and the period time before noon of the day beginning am.

I think of am and pm as periods of time between midday and midnight and not inclusive of them. Singapore, Singapore. South Africa, Cape Town. South Africa, Johannesburg. China, Beijing Municipality, Beijing. China, Shanghai Municipality, Shanghai. Spain, Barcelona, Barcelona. Congo Dem. Tanzania, Dar es Salaam. Dominican Republic, Santo Domingo. El Salvador, San Salvador. Ethiopia, Addis Ababa. United Arab Emirates, Dubai, Dubai.