Nine thirty o clock9/22/2023 ![]() How long does it take to watch a movie?.How long does it take to bounce a ball?.How long does it take to brush your teeth?.You can talk about the units of time (seconds, minutes, hours) It’s important children get a feel for how long a second, minute and hour are. Sometimes it is written as 9 o’clock (the number + o’clock)įor 12:00 there are four expressions in English.There are several different units for measuring time. We use o’clock when there are NO minutes. When it is 30 minutes past the hour we normally say: half pastģ:30 – It’s half past three (but we can also say three-thirty) ![]() When it is 15 minutes before the hour we normally say: a quarter to When it is 15 minutes past the hour we normally say: (a) quarter past (Minutes + PAST / TO + Hour)įor minutes 1-30 we use PAST after the minutes.įor minutes 31-59 we use TO after the minutes. (Hour + Minutes)Ĩ:05 – It’s eight O-five (the O is said like the letter O)Ģ) Say the minutes first and then the hour. “There are two common ways of telling the time.ġ) Say the hour first and then the minutes. ![]() It explains it rather clearly…I had to look it up because I was dictating an operative report and 10:30 o’clock just didn’t sound right, either…I settled for half past ten in the op report… So I would assume that this is why it sounds strange to use “o’clock” with fractions of hours. ![]() Early mechanical clocks were rather large, and most people measured time not by checking the clock face to see where the hands were, but by counting the number of chimes on the hour. But then I remembered that clock originally meant “bell” and that early clocks chimed on the hour (well, I suppose some modern clocks do too, but you see where I’m going). This answer doesn’t seem quite satisfying to me-it doesn’t explain why the hour hand has to be pointing directly at a number or why the minute hand doesn’t matter. Google, however, turned up plenty of examples, including a thread on Amazon’s Askville asking why you can’t say “11:30 o’clock.” The best explanation there seems to be that since the clock hands aren’t pointing at a specific hour, it can’t be anything-o’clock. o’clock.” The citations begin with Chaucer and continue up to modern English.Īnd then, out of curiosity, I checked the Corpus of Contemporary American English, but I couldn’t find any examples of x:30 o’clock. Once I had flipped to the entry and scanned through the minuscule type, I found this one line: “The hour of the day is expressed by a cardinal numeral, followed by a phrase which was originally of the clock, now only retained in formal phraseology shortened subsequently to. So then, because my wife was on the computer and I couldn’t access the OED online, I pulled out my compact OED and magnifying glass to see if it had anything to say. ![]() I checked Merriam-Webster first, but it was no help all it says is “according to the clock,” though its example sentence is “the time is three o’clock.” I then pulled out my copy of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, but it didn’t even have an entry for o’clock or clock. It says the commencement exercises will take place at “ten-thirty o’clock.” As far as I can remember, I’ve never before heard a rule against using “o’clock” with times other than the hour, but it struck me as wrong. It was pretty standard stuff-a script font in metallic ink on nice paper-but one small detail caught my eye. My sister-in-law will soon graduate from high school, and we recently got her graduation announcement in the mail. ![]()
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