Disclaimer: of course, everything is a spectrum. To ADHD-people, caffeine has varying effects. Some get tired from it, others it affects less or not at all.
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
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Do you guys say "16 o'clock?" I'm used to the 24h tube since I live in Japan, but I find myself always going back to 12h like I did in Canada where I grew up. So saying 16 o'clock in English sounds a bit unnatural for me. But I also have no problem saying 16 heure in French. Old habits die hard I guess.
I say "sechzehn Uhr" but drop the "Uhr" when adding Minutes ("sechzehn dreißig" for 16:30), except before 13:00 ("neun Uhr" for 09:00 and "neun Uhr dreißig" for 09:30) because it flows more easily. But some people keep the "Uhr" even after 13:00 (it's the official way).
Written standard though is to put "Uhr" behind all the numbers ("neun Uhr dreißig" is written as "09:30 Uhr").
Where I am I'll write 16:00 and read it aloud as "4 o'clock"
That's my preferred method as well. I like 24 hr time for writing but I'd never say it out loud, May e bc I didn't grow up saying it.
I'm from English speaking Canada and I'm doubling down on 24h and metric.
16 hours is the "official"/military way to say it
Actually, the military way to say that would be “sixteen hundred hours”. 4:30PM would be “sixteen thirty hours”. You always specify the minutes, even when it’s zero minutes, which is notated by saying “hundred” for the double-zero.
As a math nerd, this bothers me way more than it should. The reason we say "hundred" when we read a base-ten number that ends with two zeros is because that is the place value of the final non-zero digit--it is literally one hundred times the number you've already read aloud. But in the military time version, a) the hours are not hundreds of minutes, they're groups of sixty minutes, and b) it's groups of minutes, not hours, so the units also get messed up. If someone tells you it's currently 0 hours and you should meet again at 800 hours, logic would suggest they're asking you to go away for more than a month, but in fact they're saying 8 hours, despite the difference being apparently 800 hours.
I'm aware how pedantic this is, and I'm perfectly capable of understanding what they mean because I've heard it so often in movies and whatnot. But I swear these stupid games with units contribute to keeping us dumb.
16 hours is mostly an American military way to say it. 16 on the clock (or similar for different languages) is the main European way to say it.
Well, we'd say 4 o clock... But that's English too. Have considered how the rest of Europe says it?
I have to confess that I do not know how every European language says it, but I do know that both German and Danish say and write the equivalent of "o' clock/on the clock", eg. "Klokken, Uhr".
The only time I've seen "x hours" used, is either in programming, that abomination that is "military time", or when defining time from now, eg. "Let's meet in 4 hours, at 20 on the clock".