Learn English – 15:00 vs 15h00 And how to read them aloud

reading-aloudtime

Crimea referendum: 64% turnout at 15h00 as tension rises in eastern Ukraine.

Also what does it mean? And how should I read it aloud?

My try is "sixty four percent turnout at fifteen". Am I correct in this interpretation on reading it aloud ?

Best Answer

This notation is not used in any English-speaking country that I know of. It appears to be peculiar to France; your source, Euronews, is headquartered in France. Almost anywhere else this will be represented with a . or : replacing the h, or with no separator—so-called ‘military time’.

As Happy tells you, 24-hour notations are read among the military as “so-many-hundred hours”. In civilian speech, however—in the US, at least, and I think this is probably true elsewhere in the English-speaking world—24-hour notation is often, perhaps usually, “translated” into 12-hour terms, so 15h00 would be spoken as “three pee-em”, representing 3:00 pm.

But as Jolenealaska points out, many civilians in the US are familiar with the ‘military’ reading, and that familiarity is growing with the spread of the internet, where timestamps are commonly expressed in 24-hour notation. The main thing is to employ the form your hearers will be comfortable with. Use the military version with people you expect to understand it, use the translated reading if you’re not sure.