Noon
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Noon (also midday or noon time) is usually defined as 12 o'clock in the daytime. However the term midday is used colloquially to refer to a range of time, usually 11-1. The word noon is also used informally to mean midday regarding the location of the sun, as opposed to the middle of one's day. Although this is a time around the middle of the day when people in many countries take a lunch break. Solar noon is 12 o'clock apparent solar time, or around 12Template:Spaced ndash1 p.m. local time depending on daylight saving time, the moment when the sun crosses the meridian and is about at its highest elevation in the sky. The clock time of solar noon depends on the longitude and date.
The opposite of noon is midnight.
In many cultures in the northern hemisphere, noon had ancient geographic associations with the direction "south" (as did midnight with "north" in some cultures). Remnants of the noon = south association are preserved in the words for noon in French (midi) and Italian (mezzogiorno), both of which also refer to the southern parts of the respective countries. Modern Polish and Ukrainian go a step farther, with the words for noon (południe, полуденьTemplate:Spaced ndashliterally "half-day") also meaning "south" and the words for "midnight" (północ, північTemplate:Spaced ndashliterally "half-night", as with English mid(dle) meaning "half") also meaning "north".
Etymology
The word noon is derived from Latin nona hora, the ninth hour of the day, and is related to the liturgical term none. The Roman and Western European medieval monastic day began at 6:00 a.m. (06:00) by modern timekeeping, so the ninth hour started at what is now 3:00 p.m. (15:00). In English, the meaning of the word shifted to midday and the time gradually moved back to 12:00. The change began in the twelfth century and was fixed by the fourteenth century.
