Learn English – Is “10 P.M. last night” redundant

redundancytime

I know that it's redundant to say things like "8:00 A.M. in the morning" or "6:00 P.M. at night." But what if you want to specify that you're talking about a specific night, such as last night? For example:

We met them at the airport at 10:00 P.M. last night.

Would this sentence be redundant? It seems strange to have both "P.M." and "night," but leaving out "last night" would change the meaning of the sentence, since it would no longer make clear what day this occurred.

Best Answer

Certainly there are ways of phrasing it (as evidenced in the comments) that eliminate any perceived redundancy with "p.m." and "night" both being present, but this sort of phrasing would be fairly common in ordinary conversation as people construct a sentence "on the fly", adding the relevant bits as it occurs to them.
Indeed, even "10 a.m. this morning", despite its obvious redundancy, would be a very common utterance from someone who, after giving the time of an event, decided that they wanted to also specify the day.