When is morning?

Been pondering what is Morning vs night for a bit and I’ve found the answer. The simple, definitive answer. Let’s go through it.

You might be wanting to say “From 20:01AM to 11:59AM is morning, since it is all AM.” And that we do say “1 in the morning, 3 in the morning” and so on. At first glance that might seem like an easy, simple, clean win. But it is not. No it is not.

Because if we declare all AM to be morning then we would need to declare all PM as night. But we don’t call 2pm “2 at night” we call it “2 in the afternoon.” So if AM and PM aren’t strict day/night designations (since PM is used for afternoon and evening (and we can say evening and night are the same sure)) then you can not declare 1AM to be morning just because we say “1 in the morning.”

So then what is morning?

Let’s look at the other end and work backwards.

1 in the afternoon makes sense. And that hold a for a few hours. But it tends to be 5 in the evening, but maybe afternoon and certainly 6 in the evening, never 6 in the afternoon.

Given the boarder seems to be “5ish, but before 6” we can easily declare evening to begin at 5.

4 in the afternoon.

5 in the evening.

It works.

But if we flip it… well we don’t have a term for “the time before morning” that is widely used. And “4 at night” doesn’t ring right, strangely. But we can apply the same logic:

4AM is still night, regardless of common nomenclature we’ve already discussed doesn’t match reality.

6AM is very much 6 in the morning.

5AM is 5 in the morning and is, again, the barrier close enough to call it the winner.

So Morning runs from 5AM to 12PM (11:59, you know how these seeming overlaps work)

Afternoon runs from 12PM to 5PM

Evening/night runs from 5PM to 5AM because we don’t have a 4^th name for that weird slice of late night/pre-morning.

I would like to, however, suggest Afternight as a new term for 12AM to 5AM. To match Afternoon.

Regardless we have come to a final, definitive, answer:

5AM is the start of the morning and 5PM is the start of the evening/night.