Yep… I readily see the (horrid!) ambiguity here, but if I were making the request, this is what I would mean by it.
Obviously, we all need to learn from this, and phrase our demands/requests unambiguously. “Before three o’clock!”
Within an hour means by next Tuesday. Within the hour means by close of business today. Competing priorities I’m afraid.
Not a good analogy. An hour is a unit of time, while a month isn’t. Not really. A month is an arbitrary part of a year. A month could be anywhere between 28 and 31 days, while an hour is always 60 minutes. You could mean “by this day next month” but it’s a bit more fungible.
I think “week” is a bit better. If someone says “within the week” I’d take that to mean before the weekend.
But yes, I always assume “within the hour” to mean before the beginning of the next hour (3PM) and in my personal and professional life I’ve always seen it to mean that. I’ve never had a problem with ambiguity either.
Your joke aptly demonstrates why it means before 4:00. No one would say “within the decade” and mean “in ten years”. It means before, in today’s case, 2020.
Oh jesus, now you’ve done it. Cue the argument over whether the decade starts in 2020 or 2021…
According to the Oxford dictionaries website…
Definition of within the hour in English:
After less than an hour.
It might be good to remember that dictionaries get their definitions from current usage. In other words, the majority of people who use the phrase “within the hour” use it to mean within the next sixty minutes. Logic or your personal feelings otherwise, there it is.
Yep
It means within the next hour, or within an hour from now. I just say in an *hour or less * now to avoid confusion. Even if you think it means before the big hand points to the XII again you ought to know someone could be confused by that, especially if it’s ten of right now.
In theory, yes. But in how I hear it used and how I use it in my dialect, it means before the end of the current hour. While dictionaries are supposed to be descriptive, I doubt there was a poll on this particular phrase. At the very least, both meaning should be included, though I personally find the one not included to be the more popular one.
For example, here’s a poll of popular usage on a fantasy football site, so a site that I would not think is predisposed to having literal pedants on it like this one. The usage is fairly split, with it leaning towards meaning “when the current hour ends”, by a vote of 76-68.
I agree that logic has nothing to do with it, but to say that the phrase isn’t used commonly to mean “before the end of the current hour” is just incorrect, and the dictionaries should include the usage.
And while dictionaries are records of popular usage, there are a lot of words and lexicographers don’t survey every word when they release new editions. Some words can languish in even the most erudite dictionaries for decades without getting an update while spoken languages move on. As an example, check out cumin which many dictionaries list with /kumɪn/ as the only or preferred pronunciation. I don’t know about you but it’s pretty solidly /kjumɪn/ where I am.
You’re one of those “KYOO-pon” people aren’t you? 
(I say “koo-min,” but I agree that “kyoo-min” is pretty popular. Perhaps even more popular.)
We can all agree that, like bi weekly and next Wednesday, the phases are both too vague and capable of misinterpretation.
As a manager who often asked people to do some task with a deadline, I would always be specific: “I need those figures for my meeting at 3pm.” “You need to complete these forms every second week.” Ambiguous statements like “within the hour” are not only open to doubt, but also sound peremptory.
I bet you think that the ‘H’ in herb is silent too 
You know, I’m not sure? Someone called attention to it once and now I don’t know which I would say naturally. They both feel slightly right and slightly wrong.
But I fucked up my transcription. The standard dictionary pronunciation is usually /kəmin/ with what I learned as a child as the short U sound.
And I bet you think the accent for “oregano” goes on the third syllable.
“Within the hour” means “before the start of the next full hour” (i.e. “before the big hand reaches 12” - at 2:36 PM, “within the hour” means “by 3 PM”, not “by 3:36 PM”, which is “within an hour”).
Yeah, I’ve never heard it with a schwa in the first syllable. Merriam-Webster has all three mentioned pronunciations, but the first one listed is the schwa version. Dictionary.com also has “kuh-min” as the first listed pronunciation. Seriously, I’ve never heard anyone ever say that. It’s always been “koo-min” or “kyoo-min” as I’ve heard it.
Yes it does mean before the start of the next full hour, an entire 60 minutes and no less than that, starting now. I know what you mean, but I don’t accept that *the hour *refers to the divisions of a clock. It’s not a very useful phrase with that definition because it requires the parties involved to be working from the same clock, on some deadline oriented to the start of an hour on the clock, it conveys a different sense of reliability and status of the request depending on where the big hand is on the clock, and finally it’s easily misinterpreted because of the variable time span.
In conclusion, this phrase needs to go away.
I think we can agree on that. Just like “next Saturday,” which in my dialect means “next week Saturday,” not the nearest upcoming Saturday, but in other dialects apparently means, the literal next Saturday we are coming to. It’s almost reflexive for me now to say “next Saturday – um, not this Saturday but next week Saturday — etc…” just in case. I don’t use “within the hour” that often, but it’s good to know that many people interpret it as “within the next 60 minutes,” because, before this thread, I honestly did not know that. For me, it gets lopped in with phrases like “top of the hour” and “bottom of the hour.” “Within the hour” or “by the end of the hour” falls into the same pattern for me and many speakers in my region.