A couple years ago, I switched all my personal clocks 24-hour notation. I live in the US, and 24-hour time is used very, very rarely. So, I haven't been able to listen to anyone say times aloud.
Here's my question: What is the proper way to say a time aloud in 24-hour notation?
"Fifteen o'clock" sounds bad to me. I think I like "Fifteen hours" best, but it sounds a little formal.
"Fifteen twenty-two" sounds okay to me, but still strange.
Is there a 'best practice' here?
Best Answer
The armed services (and their veterans) really have this engrained in my mind as such:
Otherwise, where more precise in terms of declaring minutes, you can just split them and speak each unit of time individually:
The hours here, it might be argued, is redundant or even inaccurate, but that doesn't dictate the occurrences (or exclusion of such) in speech.
You could go the quarter to, half past route, but this is an interchangeable method of speaking time, not exclusive to verbalising time in its 24-hours form.
Since o'clock is an abbreviation of of the clock, I guess that technically you could speak in this manner in terms of 24-hours, such as: 15 o'clock. But this might sound a little peculiar to most. If we look at the definition of o'clock from TheFreeDictionary then it kind of indicates we would be playing it safer to use another form:
If we do decide to use the 24 o'clock approach, then it's just redundant, if nothing else; consider the note on relativity to the face / direction. Since, regardless of the numbers being bigger, we don't have to (necessarily) do any extra laps around the clock face to arrive at the specified location - but in cases where AM and PM might not be clearly implied, it could serve to do that.