Caroline Bologna is a senior lifestyle reporter at HuffPost. She began her career with the Webby Award-winning HuffPost Parents team before transitioning to HuffPost Life, where she now covers topics ranging from home and wellness to relationships and personal finance.
In a deeply divided country, journalism is a safeguard. Members make it possible to question authority, investigate impact, and protect democratic accountability beyond the headlines.People say it every day without thinking ― “two o’clock,” “six o’clock,” “eight o’clock sharp.
” But what is the purpose of that little “o” and apostrophe? Is it short for something? Why do we only use it for certain times? . There’s recorded evidence of the shortened “o’clock” ― written as “four oclock” ― dating as early as 1560. “The contracted form, ‘o’clock,’ became standardized in Early Modern English, around the 16th and 17th centuries, and has remained in everyday use ever since,” Touma said, describing the term as “a fossil ― a surviving fragment of a much longer medieval phrase that we no longer use in full.”“With ‘of,’ that consonant is at the front of the mouth and ‘clock’ is at the back of the mouth,” he explained. “And we try as hard as we can not to move freely between the front and back with our consonants. As a result, we decide we want to have a contraction instead of the full form ‘of clock,’ which dies out pretty quickly a couple of centuries later.”There are phonetic reasons for the evolution from"of the clock" to"o'clock." In other words, moving quickly from the “v” sound in “of” to the hard “cl” in “clock” requires your mouth to shift position in a way that English speakers prefer to avoid if possible.in addition to “o’clock.” Pronounced like “uh clock,” this is an example of the soft “schwa” vowel sound ― which is the most common sound in the English language. Basically, the tongue tends to save energy and stay in the middle of the mouth for syllables that aren’t stressed. “When there’s a vowel in an unstressed syllable in English, it tends to go to the center of the mouth ― what we call the vowel space ― and it produces the ‘schwa,’” Adams said. “In the 16th century, we’ve got evidence of people saying ‘a clock,’ as opposed to ‘of clock’ or ‘o’clock.’”“This kind of phonetic erosion is very common in English,” Touma said. “We see it in words like ‘goodbye,’ which comes from ‘God be with ye.’” Another example with the ‘o’ contraction is jack-o’-lantern, which is a shortening of “Jack of the lantern.” Touma noted that o’clock is also a “rare example” of a contraction that only persists in one very specific grammatical context.“We only use ‘o’clock’ with full hours ― ‘three o’clock,’ ‘six o’clock’ ― which preserves the structure of the original phrase referring to the numbered hour on the clock face. That specificity makes it a small but fascinating window into how English evolves.” Indeed, we don’t say “four thirty o’clock” or “six fifteen o’clock.” In recent years, however, people have gotten creative. “It is our tendency to modify, develop and play with the language we’ve got,” Adams said. He pointed to expressions like “martini o’clock” and “it’s five o’clock somewhere” as particularly transgressive and playful innovations ― ways people use language to justify their drinking habits., a language trends expert and communications manager at Preply. “What feels new today can become second nature tomorrow. That’s the beauty of language. It grows with us, and we grow with it.” The rise of “o’clock” demonstrates a broader vocabulary shift that accompanied a major technological change. “The rise of mechanical clocks in the 14th century created a need for more precise timekeeping vocabulary,” Touma said. “‘O’clock’ is a linguistic trace of that moment ― it marks the point when time stopped being measured primarily by nature and started being measured by machines.”Touma finds “o’clock” to be an interesting example of how telling time varies across languages as well. “In French and Italian, people often express time relative to the next hour ― for example, 2:45 is ‘trois heures moins le quart’ in French and ‘le tre meno un quarto’ in Italian so ‘three minus a quarter,’” he said. Meanwhile, people say 3:30 in German as ‘halb vier’ ― literally “half four” to express that it is halfway to four.“This is a quirky contrast to English’s straightforward ‘three thirty’ or ‘half past three,’” Touma said. “It’s a reminder that even something as universal as telling time can differ a lot linguistically and culturally.”By entering your email and clicking Sign Up, you're agreeing to let us send you customized marketing messages about us and our advertising partners. You are also agreeing to our
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