Am I telling the time correctly on the analog clock?

Question

Am I telling the time correctly?

It's two past one (1:02)

It's five past one (1:05)

It's a quarter past one. (1:15)

It's twenty past one. (1:20)

It's twenty-five past one. (1:25)

It's twenty-six past one (1:26)

It's half past one (1:30)

It's twenty-six to ten. (9:34)

It's a quarter to ten. (9:45)

It's one to ten. (9:59)

I'm just reading The Grammar Guide by Coutlée, Joannette and Anita Romano (It doesn't provide much detail) and this article https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/time?q=Time%3A+seconds%2C+minutes%2C+hours%2C+years

The question is about the analog clock. I just put the digital format (numbers) on the side to accurately indicate the time I'm trying to tell.

Thank you!

Answer 1

Those are nearly right, but when it's not a multiple of 5 minutes we almost always say the word "minute(s)".

So:

It's two minutes past one.

It's twenty-six minutes past one.

It's twenty-six minutes to ten.

It's one minute to ten.

We can say minutes when it's five/ten/twenty/twenty-five, but we often don't. But we almost always do for other numbers of minutes - even for "fifteen", if we say that:

It's a quarter past one. (most common)

It's fifteen minutes past one. (acceptable, usually when we are being exact about the number of minutes)

It's fifteen past one. (Unusual).

Answer 2

As a native Londoner, here is what I am most likely to say (and hear) at those times (given below in 24 hour format):

1302: "Two minutes past one." "It's just gone one."

1305: "Five past one."

1315: "Quarter past one."

1320: "It's twenty past." If the hour can be inferred, it's often dropped. If people are asking because they need to catch a train at a particular time, or waiting for a meeting to start, the assumption is they're asking about the minutes, rather than the hour.

1325: "It's twenty-five past (one)."

1326: "It's just gone twenty-five past (one)." Unless it's a circumstance where the listener needs the exact time, we're likely to approximate to the nearest 5 minutes. 1326, 1327: "about twenty five past". 1328-1329: "nearly half past"

1329: "It's nearly half-past (one)."

1330: "It's half past one on the dot." "It's half one exactly."

0934: "It's nearly twenty five to (ten)." Anything other than the 5 minute increments of 25,20,15,10,5 feel strange to say. "It's twenty-six to ten." would be very rare to hear, much more likely to be exact for that and say "It's nine thirty-four."

0945: "It's quarter to ten." We drop the "a" from "It's a quarter to ten." "Quarter to" and "quarter past" feel like their own times.

0959: "It's nearly ten (o'clock)."

Someone reading a digital clock will likely tell you the reading, but with analogue clocks, conversationally, you are likely to get these more vague, conversational answers.

Answer 3

These are all grammatically correct.

Some of them sound unnatural. You would probably say "one oh two" not "two past one" and "one twenty six" rather than "twenty six past one", even when reading an analog clock. The former construction is customary for 10, 20, 40 and 50. For 1:30 you can say either "one thirty", "half past one".

"One to ten" sounds strange since it suggests counting. "One minute to ten" would be better, unless the context is absolutely clear and you really want to use the fewest possible words.

Answer 4

Here's the perspective of a native West Coast American speaker - which I believe is, in this case, the same as the General American perspective.

All times, regardless of where you're reading them, are spoken as "[hour] [minute]", where [minute] is always spoken as a two-digit number. So, for minutes 10-59, the number is spoken normally ("ten", "fifty-nine", etc.) but for minutes 1-9, the number is spoken as "oh-one", "oh-nine", etc. Minute 0 is not pronounced, but in that case, we say "[hour] o'clock".

With that fairly simple set of rules, here's how we'd read those times:

• 1:02 - one oh-two
• 1:05 - one oh-five
• 1:15 - one fifteen
• 1:20 - one twenty
• 1:25 - one twenty-five
• 1:26 - one twenty-six
• 1:30 - one thirty
• 9:34 - nine thirty-four
• 9:45 - nine forty-five
• 9:59 - nine fifty-nine

If you're speaking to an American, use these forms. You don't need to worry about whether the past/to forms are correct, because the plain numeric forms are always correct.

That said, if you feel compelled to use past/to, don't make us do too much mental math. We're likely to try to convert the to number to the more common, numeric number, which makes "twenty-six to ten" sound ridiculous (the listener will say in their head, "wait...sixty minus twenty-six...")

Answer 5

Just for the record, I'm putting in the actual answer to the question asked:

The type of clock does not determine how you speak the time.

As the OP explains to us,

" I just thought [elements such as "a quarter"] were specific to analogue watches, and then I saw they weren't."

Answer 6

Your audience matters a lot when choosing the method to speak times. As another answer already noted, Americans are quite familiar with just saying the time as you would read it on a digital clock ("ten thirty," "one fifteen," "two oh two"). This isn't the only method used here, but it's really common and is universally understood.

Where you can get into trouble is if you use certain British patterns that aren't used in the US when speaking to Americans. So, if you say it's "half six," many Americans will wonder whether that means 5:30 or 6:30. If you say it's "ten to six," then I might grumble about having to do subtraction in my head to work out that it's really 5:50, and I might wonder why you didn't just say "five fifty" and communicate clearly.

If your audience is British, then I'm unable to answer from that perspective.

One final consideration: Books that teach English times tend to only show one or two of a variety of ways, without any explanation that this is highly regional. The selection might be the author's preference, or it might be chosen to serve some other purpose, such as teaching the vocabulary of "half" and "quarter." At any rate, be aware that there are many ways to do this, and which way is best depends on who your audience is--or where they're from.

Answer 7

First and foremost, the type of clock does not dictate the way the time is read. A digital clock or digital watch is more likely to be ready by younger generations by simply reading off the numbers, but that has more to do with how younger generations tend to conceptualize time than it does with any linguistic rule.

As far as how to read off times:

• Simply reading off the numbers will pretty much always be understood correctly irrespective of dialect (but see my comment at the end about 24-hour time).
• X:15 can be read off as ‘quarter past X’ or ‘quarter after X’. X:30 can be read as ‘half past X’ or ‘half after X’. X:45 can be read as ‘quarter till X+1’ or ‘quarter to X+1’. These will almost always be properly understood irrespective of dialect, though the preferred form is often regionally dependent (for example, most Australian and British speakers I know prefer the ‘past’ form to the ‘after’).
• If it’s only one or two minutes past an exact hour or quarter hour and the exact time is not relevant, then ‘just after X’, ‘just gone X’, or ‘just past X’ is sometimes used, though this is inexact and tends to be very region and dialect dependent (I hear these forms a lot from people I know in the UK or Australia, but only rarely from people around where I live in the US Midwest).
• If the minutes are a multiple of five, similar forms are also generally considered acceptable in at least some dialects, and will usually be understood without issue. For example 1:10 as ‘ten after one’ or 5:40 as ‘twenty to five’. However, these forms are significantly less common than simply reading off the numbers, especially among younger speakers.
• Otherwise, if the minutes are not a multiple of five, the standard is to just read off the numbers.

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As a quick aside, 24-hour time is special in English. Most Americans who don’t have military background will, if confronted with 24-hour time, look at you like you just stepped out of a flying saucer, and I’ve seen similar responses from many English speakers outside of the US as well.

In the uncommon cases where 24-hour time is expected in spoken English, the only correct way to read a 24-hour clock is to just read off the numbers directly. In the much more common cases where 24-hour time is not expected, the norm is to mentally convert to 12-hour time and use the rules outlined above.

Answer 8

It's correct (for American English, anyway), but sounds very old-fashioned.

Nowadays, people are so used to reading the digits off a digital clock (on their mobile phone, if they don't have another clock), that the “analog” way of phrasing the time is dying out. Younger people will get confused if you say “it's a quarter past 11” instead of the expected “it's 11:15”. Many don't even know how to read an analog clock.

People who are reading the time from an analog clock may be more prone to round it (e.g., to the nearest 5 minutes) than to state the exact minute, but even then, the time is still always written and usually pronounced the “digital” way.

It may be helpful to know the traditional “{X (minutes) | quarter | half} {past | to | 'til} [hour]” convention for the sake of understanding older literature or song lyrics, but don't expect to ever use it in conversation.

Answer 9

For the sake of completeness, there's one other (possibly regional?) variant nobody has mentioned yet, which is to use the word "of" instead of "to" for times before the specified hour. e.g. you might hear:

• 8:40 as "twenty of nine"
• 8:45 as "quarter of nine"
• 8:55 as "five of nine"

etc.