8

Say the working hours of a bank are from 7am to 4pm.

Is it correct to say

The bank opens at 7 am and closes 4 pm ("open" & "close" are verbs)

or

The bank is open at 7 am and closed 4 pm ("open" & "closed" are adjectives)

Are the statements "The bank opens/closes at 7 am / 4 pm" and "The bank is open/closed at 7 am / 4pm" the same?

Cave Johnson
  • 173
  • 9
Tom
  • 22,959
  • 54
  • 244
  • 427

4 Answers4

28

The bank opens at 7 am.

This means that the bank is closed before 7 am, and open afterwards. The bank becomes open at 7 am.

The bank is open at 7 am.

This means that, if you went to the bank at 7 am, you would see that the bank is open. But it does not say whether the bank becomes open at 7 am. For example, it is possible that the bank opens at 6 am, and it remains open at 7 am. The sentence is true either way. Perhaps you could understand my meaning from context, but it is not guaranteed.

Therefore, you should say: The bank opens at 7 am and closes at 4 pm.

You could also say: The bank is open from 7 am to 4 pm. This means that the bank is open between those two times, and implies that it is closed at other times.

MJ713
  • 1,315
  • 8
  • 17
  • 6
    While this answer is technically correct, no 'native' is going to interpret things this way - both effectively mean exactly the same thing. – MikeB Aug 27 '21 at 10:52
  • 13
    Imagine the same bank above receiving a call from a customer: Is the bank open at 11am? What about 6pm? Reply: The bank is open at 11am and closed at 6pm. Context determines whether that sentence means "opens/closes", as the OP explained, and this applies even to "native" speakers. – March Ho Aug 27 '21 at 12:26
  • @MikeBrockington "I wake up with the sudden recollection of the payment I need to make. I rush to the bank. Luckily, the bank is open". Clearly this means the bank is in the state of being open, rather than being in the process of opening. "The bank opens", on the other hand, would mean it's currently in the process of opening (although if you wanted to say that in the example I gave, a slightly different phrasing would be necessary). – NotThatGuy Aug 27 '21 at 13:10
  • 3
    @NotThatGuy and MarchHo - neither of your examples are anything like the OP, who appears to me to be pretty clearly talking about a written statement of opening hours. – MikeB Aug 27 '21 at 13:10
  • 1
    @MikeBrockington Any reasonable native speaker may indeed interpret the sentences given in the question in the same way. Outside of other context, they may consider both to be referring to opening hours, but, if so, they will consider one to be grammatically incorrect. Without more context, if someone were to write a story where they say "do no come closer dear" to a hoofed grazing or browsing animal, the logical interpretation is that they simply misspelled "deer", rather than the pure grammatical interpretation of it being their loved one. It doesn't change the definition of "dear". – NotThatGuy Aug 27 '21 at 13:24
  • 1
    @MikeBrockington You have a point. I agree that a native speaker would be able to understand the meaning of the "is open" sentence from context (assuming the context is as you describe). And now that I'm looking, a Google search shows that there are cases where native speakers produce that kind of sentence. But I still hold that "opens" is both the more common form and more technically correct. – MJ713 Aug 27 '21 at 13:34
  • 1
    I have to agree that the answer is technically correct and useful for ELL. However, in common usage ALL would be "correct", i.e. understood correctly. In part this is because common usage is often a bit lazy, sloppy, and loosy goosy. In conversation we rely on common assumptions, and usage reflects that. So, "correct" comes in many shades of grey. Strictly technically, this answer provides grammatical usage that has greater clarity and less potential for misunderstanding. But it isn't the only answer. – Mark G B Aug 27 '21 at 15:40
  • 1
    @MarkGB You can say the same about a whole lot of things in English. Just because people understand you doesn't mean they think you're speaking "correctly". If enough people speak "incorrectly", that becomes "correct", but it doesn't stop it from being considered incorrect until then (or from being considered incorrect after it enters common usage). Sloppy usage might be common, but it's not an appropriate recommendation for how to speak properly (which is what this site provides). You could say that the sloppy usage is also common (without recommending it), but is that even the case here? – NotThatGuy Aug 27 '21 at 16:14
  • 1
    @NotThatGuy, if one is understood by those around them, then what is correct? Being understood is the whole point of communicating. The "rules" of grammar are here to serve that cause, or they become pedantic. As for recommending sloppy usage, who recommended it? Not I. And yes, some of the OP's usage is what I would call sloppy, or more accurately lazy, but also common, and assuredly nearly everyone in the US would understand the speaker's intended meaning. – Mark G B Aug 27 '21 at 18:45
  • Being understood doesn't imply correctness when that understanding leans on special context of any sort. The pairing of opening and closing time here is a special context that helps people understand despite the error and shouldn't be taken as validation of it. – ttbek Aug 27 '21 at 18:52
  • @MarkGB So you said it's sloppy and common and you said "in common usage all would be correct", but that isn't a recommendation (although that's not how I understood it, which, by your logic, seems like it should be the most important part, but I digress). So I honestly just have no idea what you're actually trying to say. Yes, some people may be able to understand you even if you go as far as writing a garbled mess, misspelling every word and putting them in an order that would make any English teacher cry. But what does that have to do with this question or answer specifically? – NotThatGuy Aug 27 '21 at 19:33
  • 1
    "The bank is open from 7 am to 4 pm." And in practice a native speaker will just say "The bank is open (from) 7 to 4", with the from being optional and often dropped and the am/pm omitted because it's obvious. – eps Aug 27 '21 at 19:57
  • @MikeBrockington FWIW, without additional context, this native speaker would interpret the two statements in exactly the two different ways that MJ713 described. If someone told me that the bank "is open at 8am" I would definitely not assume that it's closed at 7am. Likewise, if you tell me that "It'll rain this afternoon" I'm not going to assume that the morning will be dry. If I asked a native speaker what time the bank opened and they replied "it is open at 8" then I would assume that they deliberately phrased it that way to convey "I dunno, but I've been there at 8 and it was open" – A C Aug 28 '21 at 10:37
  • To get back to what the OP actually wrote: "Are the statements "The bank opens/closes at 7 am / 4 pm" and "The bank is open/closed at 7 am / 4pm" the same?" In my opinion, they mean the same thing IN THAT CONTEXT Of course they mean other things in other contexts, and aren't perfect examples of how it should be written. – MikeB Aug 31 '21 at 13:42
  • @MikeBrockington kind of a late reply but I think the key is including the closing time. Since the OP used slashes, that implies that the end time is optional. If someone only said "The bank is open at 7am", I would say that is too ambiguous to assume that it opens at 7am. I think a native speaker should clarify that the bank is closed before 7am. – Cave Johnson Sep 10 '21 at 22:47
2

Forget about the "at", since that only specifies a time without changing the meaning of the preceding words.

So let's just consider "The bank opens" and "The bank is open". You might already understand both and how they're different based on this alone.

In "The bank opens", "open" is a verb (like "The man runs"). It refers to the actual process of opening (like "The man runs" would refer to the process of the man running). Something needs to be happening. That is to say the bank actually goes from being closed to being open at the given time and this would specify the start of their opening hours.

In "The bank is open", "open" is an adjective (like "The man is blue"). It refers to the state of being open (like "The man is blue" would refer to the state of the man being blue). It just refers to how things currently are and doesn't say anything is currently happening. That is to say you can go into the bank at the given time (because it's open) and this could be at any point during their opening hours. The bank is open at 9. It's also open at 10 and 11 and 12.

NotThatGuy
  • 931
  • 6
  • 6
0

ALL of the proposed constructions are reasonable and potentially interchangeable in common usage. They would be more, or less, understandable from the audience's point of view, depending on the audience. You might find some variation of the suggested usages regionally (colloquial). Some of the constructions listed leave modest room for different interpretations, and thus, potential misunderstandings.

For instance,

-"The bank is open at 7 am and closed 4 pm"

does not specify that the bank closes at the hour of 4 PM. It grammatically specifies that the bank was closed by that time on some ungiven past day. The bank could be closing at 3:30. We don't know. It could have been closed some previous day at 4 PM, as closed is past tense. We don't know. However, in common usage, most listeners would assume that the speaker was referring to the same day, with the intended meaning of "will be closing at". This is because we have a common experience. We all know approximately what time the bank closes, and we expect the speaker to be consistent inside a sentence. For the speaker to jump from today ("open at 7") to yesterday ("closed 4") would be inconsistent.

A speaker concerned with clarity would more likely use the more specific construction, e.g. "closes at", or "is closed at". Also, while "it's closed at" is common usage, one could say that it is more correct to use "it will be closed at" (although this might also be pedantic).

Mark G B
  • 754
  • 4
  • 15
  • @NotThatGuy I think you need to read what was written more carefully. – Mark G B Aug 27 '21 at 18:48
  • 1
    Comment v2: "Jumping from today ("open at 7") to yesterday ("closed 4") would be inconsistent" - Interpreting it as "The bank closed at 4 PM" would indeed be inconsistent, but that seems irrelevant, as the consistent interpretation would be "The bank is closed at 4 PM". The sentence is ambiguous and you picked the inconsistent interpretation instead of the consistent one, and then dismissed it as inconsistent in favour of interpreting it differently from consistent interpretation. Why even mention the inconsistent interpretation at all, when there's a perfectly consistent one available? – NotThatGuy Aug 27 '21 at 19:47
  • On what basis are you saying that they are "reasonable and potentially interchangeable"? If you are asserting that they are in common usage, it's probably still worth highlighting that it's incorrect according to formal grammar. If you say it's reasonable simply because they'd be understandable, then you can post pretty much the same thing to pretty much any question asking which version is correct. If that were a valid answer, answers would lose most meaning. The only sensible way to answer would be either descriptively or prescriptively, not based on what others may be able to decipher. – NotThatGuy Aug 27 '21 at 19:58
0

In common usage, both would be correct, but "is open at…" will never appear in common usage.

Strictly, even "The bank opens/closes at 7 am / 4 pm" is unlikely to be seen in common usage.

Special abbreviations or purely individual styles are fine so long as you know that's what you're using.

Common usage pretty-much insists on "The bank opens at 7am and closes at 4pm" and it could be that's precisely to avoid this kind of doubt.

Readers might prefer different styles for time, such as 7:00am, and that's so much more specific and detailed, it doesn't much matter here.

Robbie Goodwin
  • 1,107
  • 7
  • 13