I use it interchangeably with other expressions of short duration - if I get an urgent support call (I’m in IT) and I know I can resolve it in ten to twenty minutes, I’ll often say “it’ll be fixed within the hour” (assuming there are ten to twenty minutes left in the hour - otherwise I might say “it’ll be done by lunchtime”, or “it’ll be done in the next half hour”, or something like that. the beauty of language is that you don’t have to use the same style of idiom all the time.
I have a response for this, I’ll get back to you within the hour.
Now hold your breath for 59 minutes because that is the way I use it also.
Hmm. My parents (both native Britons) are apparently in the “next 60 minutes” camp, as have (judging from this thread) everyone who’se ever said it to me.
Thanks a lot Blunt, now I have to revise my whole existance. 
It is most certainly before the top of the hour, before the minute hand next passes 12, or you should be using within AN hour.
I have always used it this way. Same - as within the week means by the end of the week…
I have always used “within the hour” to mean “before the top of the hour”, and have seldom heard it used any other way. If I want to indicate that something will happen within the next 1-hour period, I use “within an hour”. It’s a moderately subtle distinction, but it seems semantically clear. I don’t understand why anyone would interpret it differently.
As for why I use it–it provides finer distinction of meaning. It’s a way to distinguish between something happening before a set time, rather than within a set period. I use it in relation to maintenance window schedules; the top of the hour is often chosen as a go/no-go decision point. If you say you’ll have a problem fixed “within the hour”, it may mean that it’ll be ready for a “go” decision, whereas “within an hour” would potentially put it too late to perform a rollback if your solution doesn’t work.
In general, all time duration estimates (as opposed to giving an actual time “o’ the clock”) should be assumed to be relative to right now. I would take (or use) “within the hour” to mean “within the (next coming) hour”, i.e., in 60 minutes time or so.
Of course this is as rough a figure as saying “just one sec” or “gimme five minutes”, which are just ways of saying “very, very soon” and “pretty soon” with no real precision intended, despite the use of actual numbers in the timeframe. Just as I would not hold someone to one tick of the second hand on my watch if they said “be with you in just one sec” (except as a very juvenile joke – which I do sometimes), I would not interpret “within the hour” as anything more precise than meaning “I’m in the middle of something right now, but expect to finish it in the next half hour or so, and you’ll be next after that”.
Using it to mean “before the next full hour on the clock” would require a lot better sense of the exact current clock time than most people operate with, and would only really make sense sense for people in an environment where something regularly happens on the hour marker only, like carilloneurs or something (“Cover for me, I’ll be back before the next BONNG”). If that is what is meant, I would simply say something like “get back to you by 10” (o’ clock), assuming it was after 9am, to mean “by the next clock hour”.
I’ve (and everyone else I’ve asked around here) always thought it meant within the next 60 minutes.
Exactly.
If “the hour” refers to the timeframe between the last and the next full hour on the clock, then logically, the phrase “within the hour” could refer to something that happened earlier, since that would also be an event that happened after the last clock hour but before the one coming up (i.e., something that happened at 10:15 when it’s 10:20 now). Not very useful, is it?
Either that, or the phrase would have a sort of half-life decay of usefulness, where at 10:00 it has a full 60 minutes worth of utility, but by 10:50 only 10 minutes. When would you ever use this phrase, really, instead of “within an hour”?
75 minutes…
…which is 60 minutes from saying it and a 15 minute leaway.
When we invented Daylight Saving(s) Times the meaning of within the hour went out the window, as it could mean 1h59m, which is just ludicrous.
I’m on his boat with this one.
AN and THE makes all the difference. I never hear anyone say THE though.
Agreed. It never occured to me that when someone used that expression they were refering to an hour on the clock, rather than an actual hour time period starting when they say it, and ending up to 60 minutes later. If anyone has ever said it to me and mean by the end of whatever clock-hour they said it during, I haven’t noticed.
Why would someone say that rather than by _ o’clock? It’s now 7:38, why would anyone say within the hour if they really meant within 22 minutes from now 
So what? It means what it means, regardless of how useful that may or may not be.
It is only one of a set of similar phrases:
-Within the day (meaning before sunset or close of business)
-Within the week (meaning before the weekend)
And I’m sure they all traditionally mean “before the current named period of time expires”. That’s why the definite article is used.
Yes, and no. I don’t argue that this is the logical distinction, but I think using it this way is (a) in the minority, (b) is on the wane and (c) would cause confusion. If we go beyond “what things SHOULD mean” to “what things DO mean” (when used in general communication), utility will trump logic/sense in the long run.
I remember reading a vicious diatribe written sometime in the late 1800s against the increasing use of “terrific” to mean “really good”, since “terrific” had its roots in the word “terror” and meant, had always meant, and logically should always mean “something that inspires terror”, just as “horrific” meant “inspiring horror”. Back then it was just reverse-negative slang, on the order of someone using “wicked” these days to mean “awesome, really neat-o, hey that’s cool”. But by now you’d be hard pressed to find any native speaker of English who would even agree that the word “terrific” could mean “inspiring terror” until you pointed out the similarity to horror->horrific. And the final reaction would probably be a shrug and a “hey, that’s weird”, instead of “hey, I’ve been using ‘terrific’ ALL WRONG, time to line up my language use in line with logic!”
If (a) fewer people use “within the hour” to mean “by the next full clock hour” than to mean “within an hour”, and (b) those who do use it this way get to use it far more rarely, then I can only conclude that this usage is not long for this world, whatever the logical interpretation of the words are or should be.
I agree that usage defines and modifies language, and I suspect that the minority relegation of my interpretation is a phenomenon of American usage. I’d be surprised if the situation is the same here in the UK - certainly my (limited) experience would seem to suggest that the two forms mean two different things in common usage here.