“It´s about time”

An etymological look at the story behind the lenguage – by Ian Gibs

As we’ll be changing the clocks on the 29th of March this year, it only seems fair to talk about hours, years and time in general. After all, time is such an integral part of everyday life that it’s hard to imagine not knowing it. Imagine… no phone, no watch, no clock on the wall. Just a vague feeling it’s getting late. For most of human history, if you were out in the fields or hunting in the woods, “what time is it?” was basically “how far is the sun from doing that disappearing act?”

Which is why the village bell was such a big deal. Church bells didn’t just call you to prayer – they were the original public notifications: ding… it’s an hour. So here’s that lovely linguistic bit: the word clock is nothing to do with our current concept of what you see on the wall, its original meaning was bell (via medieval Latin for bell: clocca – possibly borrowed from the similar Celtic klokkos). So when we say “two o’clock,” we’re really saying “two of the bell,” and that tiny apostrophe is just the spectre of the missing “the.” The ghost in the clockwork.

Now, hours. We treat them as fixed, obedient chunks – but did you know they weren’t always so well-behaved? The ancient Egyptians are widely credited with formalising the idea of dividing the day into 24 parts, but in a way that would horrify modern commuters: it was 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night-time… regardless of season! That means a summer daylight “hour” would be longer than a winter one. On the one hand: wonderful for not having to get up in the dark. On the other: a nightmare for working out train timetables.

The word hour itself comes down to us through Latin from ancient Greek hōra, meaning a “season” or “period” of time – not necessarily a neat sixty-minute box. Meanwhile, the equivalent in Old English was tīd (pronounced roughly “teed”), and it still pops up today as tide in the expressions: high tide / low tide (a maritime cycle), Yuletide (winter festival season), Whitsuntide (Pentecost season), and tidings – literally “news of the times.”

Then there’s our chronological obsession with 12 and 60. The Egyptians loved 12 (months, zodiac-style divisions, and so on), while the Babylonians preferred 60, which is why we have 60 minutes in an hour, in Latin if you divided an hour by 60 you got little pieces of time adoringly called ‘pars minuta prima’ (“first small part”) simplified to minutes. However if you divided by 60 again you got ‘pars minuta secunda’ (“second small parts”) or seconds! And yes, there were even “third small parts” at one point (but society decided life was too short to bother with them).

Finally, the bigger chunks: a month comes from a ‘moon’, referring to its roughly 29-day cycle, and week comes from Old English wucu, linked to the idea of “turning” – as in the turning of lunar phases. So this month when you’re grumbling about getting up that one hour earlier, you’re not just rejigging a number. You’re hearing bells, watching moons, borrowing Babylonian maths, and carrying around a pocketful of ancient languages – one tick at a time.