People only just realising what AM and PM stand for – and they’re shocked

Common parlance is full of various idioms and words that are used without a second thought for what they really mean, or where they originated.

Most people will be familiar with times of the day being expressed as either am or pm, but one user was brave enough in a recent post to admit they didn’t know what the letters am and pm stood for, and asked the for answers.

In their recent post, @IAMTOINEJ said: “I might be called stupid after this, but WTF does ‘AM’ and ‘PM’ stand for?”

It turns out they weren’t alone, with multiple people piling in, amazed that they’d never questioned what the common every day intialism refers to.

While some may have assumed that am stands for “after midnight”, and pm for “past morning”, the answer is not that simple.

In fact, am stands for the Latin ante meridiem, which translates to “before midday”, meaning the hours in the day before noon.

Meanwhile, pm stands for post meridiem or “after midday”, any time after noon.

In response to the X-er’s post, one user said: “I bet 5,000 people got the answer to that question from this post, when they didn’t even have the question in them before this post.”

“That makes it a great post. It made people think and answered the question,” they added.

Another said: “I’ve never in my life thought to ask this question… lmao.”

A third added: “Haha, my wife just said, ‘almost morning and past morning?'”, as per .

But while it’s become the prefered way of establishing a clear way of expressing the time, it does continue to cause confusion where noon and midnight are concerned.

As explains on its website, noon is “neither ‘ante’ (am) nor ‘post’ (pm) meridiem”, and 12 midnight is “also neither am nor pm,” encouraging people to use “noon” and “midnight” instead to avoid ambiguity.

The 24-hour clock removes this issue, with noon expressed as 12:00 and midnight as 00:00 or 24:00.