When you say or hear “middle of the night” what hour comes to mind?
(poll on the way)
It’s not midnight. Midnight may be the middle of the period of time when it’s dark outside, but I interpret the “night” of the phrase “middle of the night” as the period of time when people are normally in bed asleep. So I think of a time when the most people (including, usually, myself) would be in bed, like 3:00 a.m.
We think alike. I wonder at the relative rarity of a 1 AM vote. But I’m not surprised at the low frequency of PM hours.
The expression came up on a Toots Shor documentary and Jackie Gleason said either 3 or 4 AM. That sounded right to me. It’s rare that I’m in for the night before 11 PM or after 2 AM, so assuming a waking hour in the 6-8 AM range, 3 AM seems closest for my habits.
I voted 3AM and have a sub-question: is the “middle of the night” the same as “0 dark 30”?
9 in the afternoon.
Serious answer: 3 am is the closest. But 3 am isn’t the exact middle of the night. It’s more like 3:30. But since 4 am is only 2 hours from dawn, 3 am is a better answer if I had to select one. Really, any time between 3 am and 4 am is the middle of the night, with 2:31 to 4:59 on the edges. (Advance an hour or so in both cases if it’s a party weekend.)
Not in my world, anyway. O-Dark-30 is the time you have to get up when you must get up way earlier than normal.
I’m not laughing! When I worked nights that was real close to the right answer.
Seems reasonable to me, and I have always wondered about that, too. Why not post a poll for ideas on that?
So, what hour?
I said 2 am. My reasoning is that I usually sleep 11-6, so half way between those is 2:30 am. I just rounded that to 2:00 since that is usually about the time my pre-schooler wanders into our bedroom crying about a bad dream.
I picked 3:00 AM. If I woke up at 2:00 I would still have plenty of sleep time left. However, waking up at 4:00 is only a couple of hours away from wakey up time.
When I was in the Air Force, it was usually about 4:00 AM. Time to shower, dress, and attend a 5:00 AM briefing for a 7:00 AM takeoff.
Anytime you have to get up but have to say “What the hell?!? Why do I have to be up this damn early?!?”
In other words, 4am.
I tend to stay up late most evenings anyway, and though I am even sometimes up 'til 2 or 3, even on a work night, I still think of those hours as “the middle of the night”. I’d think most reasonable people would be to bed at or before midnight, and I know plenty of reasonable people waking up as early as 4:00 to get to work. So, that leaves the only real hours that one could pretty much expect a given person to be asleep, not working night shift or out partying, would be around 2-3. I think if, say, someone called me at 1:00, I’d describe it as really late, or if someone called me at 4:00, I’d describe it as really early.
Ah, excellent point! So “the middle of the night” could be defined as the dividing line between “really late” and “really early.”
Looking at it from the Earth’s point of view instead of the POV of electrically-lit humans: 12 midnight, approximately, at least if you’re at the central meridian of a given time zone. Except that daylight savings time moves that to circa 1 am.
Anything else than the sun being at the midpoint between the western horizon and the eastern horizon would vary widely depending on the season, making the answer difficult to pinpoint at a fixed time, unless you’re near the equator.
Middle of the night: 1 - 3 AM
Wee hours: 3 - 5 AM
Early morning 5 - 7 AM
I picked 2:00, but it could just as easily been 3:00. Anytime after the bars close, there’s nothing but crap on TV, but it’s not yet early morning.
I’d say based off my own intuition of the average adult bedtime being around 10-11 pm, and the average wake time to be around 7-8 am… the middle of that would but it right in the neighborhood of 3am.
Intuitively then, I always picture 3am-ish anytime I hear that expression.
I interpret “night” to mean the night. It has nothing to do with when I or anyone else is sleeping. I have worked a night shift–that didn’t make day “night.”
The hour I first thought of is that from 12 to 1, so I went with 12 as the first significant digits of that hour. 