this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
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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.