ClockHubClockHubtwelve hundred · noon
Military time writes every hour of the day as a two-digit number from 00 to 23, then appends the minutes as two more digits. 1200 therefore means 12 hours and 00 minutes past midnight — 12:00 PM on a 12-hour clock.
Read aloud it becomes "twelve hundred". A zero minutes value is spoken as "hundred", which is why whole hours end in "hundred"; minutes below ten take an "oh" in front, as in "seventeen oh five" for 1705.
Twelve-hour clocks split the day at noon. Hours 00 through 11 are AM, hours 12 through 23 are PM, and the two boundary hours are the ones people get wrong: 0000 is 12:00 AM and 1200 is 12:00 PM. 1200 sits on the PM side of that line, which is why it converts to 12:00 PM.
Going the other way is the same arithmetic in reverse. Take 12 and PM, drop the suffix, and add 12 to any PM hour — then watch the two twelve-o’clock cases, where 12 AM becomes 00 and 12 PM stays 12. 12:00 PM becomes 1200.
| Military | Standard | Spoken |
|---|---|---|
| 1000 | 10:00 AM | ten hundred |
| 1030 | 10:30 AM | ten thirty |
| 1100 | 11:00 AM | eleven hundred |
| 1130 | 11:30 AM | eleven thirty |
| 1200 | 12:00 PM | twelve hundred |
| 1230 | 12:30 PM | twelve thirty |
| 1300 | 1:00 PM | thirteen hundred |
| 1315 | 1:15 PM | thirteen fifteen |
| 1330 | 1:30 PM | thirteen thirty |
| 1340 | 1:40 PM | thirteen forty |
| 1400 | 2:00 PM | fourteen hundred |