#The word clock in latin how to

The civil day ( dies civilis) ran from midnight ( media nox) to midnight. I've actually seen this verse translated to Spanish as era como la hora décima ( it was approximately the tenth hour) in a fairly literal translation.Duration and distribution of horae and vigiliae on equinoxes and solstices of the year AD 8 for Forum Romanum.

See this map for details.ģ This could be debated, I think, since quasi means almost, but also as if. It may be usually off by a few minutes, and in some places-like western China-may even be off by up to three hours.

I might have been in my twenties when I realized noon was a relevant astronomical event, so I think it's worth mentioning.Ģ Provided that your timezone matches the natural astronomical time.

#The word clock in latin how to

This question: How to express a time exactly on the hour?, already linked by Joonas which addresses a number of further details.ġ Not so for those like me living in the Southern Hemisphere, nor all year long for those living in the tropics. So you could probably say altera meditate horae quartae to signify at/during the time between 9:30 and 10:00 AM, and initio horae quintae to mean shortly after 10:00 AM. or more probably at the beginning of the IV, Agnes (i.e., Ecclesiastical Latin, probably from Antiquity) that makes reference to the 'second half', and the 'beginning' of a time period (a Century in this case):Īltera meditate saéculi III, vel probabilius initio saeculi IV, Romae martyr occubuit / She died a martyr during the second half of the III cent. Update: I just found by chance a text in the Roman Missal for the feast day of St. 3 I suspect you can also say, for example, hora prima dimidiata to mean around 6:30 AM. To be more specific without knowing minutes, you can say hora quasi decima (cf. Most of the above also applies to AM/PM → hora tertia post meridiem → 3 to 4 PM. The name usually refers to the whole hour, so hora prima may well mean (around the equinox) any time from modern 6:00 AM to 7:00 AM 2, and quarta vigilia noctis → about 9 to 10 PM. In this system, hours of the night are called vigiliae and also adapt their length seasonally. Especially in the day/night system, these multiples of 3 also have a wider meaning (mid morning, noon, mid afternoon) and tend to be preferred even if less precise.

That said, the specific hours are said hora + : hora tertia, hora sexta, hora nona, etc. Meridian and the root meridional- (related to the South in several languages) are derived from meridies too. The sun pointed South at noon for the Romans 1, so meridies got to mean South, too. This was the middle of the day and hence meridies in Latin AM= ante meridiem, PM= post meridiem. The AM/PM system is independent from the length of the daytime, and originally set the reference point at (astronomical) noon, i.e., the instant when the sun is highest in the local sky.The hours in the day/night system varied their length according to the time of the year: summer → longer daytime hours, winter → shorter.Hours were counted from 1 to 12, and it didn't have too much sense to be overly precise. The earliest known mention of the minute ( pars minuta prima, the first small part ) seems to be from the XIII century. There are two systems, 1) one based on day & night, and 2) the AM/PM we use today (kind of).īoth systems divide the day in two halves of twelve hours: daylight and night, and before and after noon, respectively.īear in mind that number zero wasn't known to Romans as a proper number, and precise time reckoning wasn't possible before the mechanical clock.