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I often see English notation about time using the " and ' symbols. I have always mistaken about the two, and even their meaning.

I'm more used to "01:05:56", for example.

How do you represent the hour, minutes, and seconds using the apostrophe and quotes punctuations? Which is for the hour, which is for minutes, and which is for seconds?

Is it the common way to write duration of time elapsed? Do they have a special pronunciation?

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  • Do you mean as in on a stopwatch? If so then this is a really good question. I've only ever seen that notation in stopwatches and GPS coordinates (I assume they are related). Googling now, but nothing yet....
    – David John Welsh
    Commented May 17, 2013 at 11:10
  • @DavidJohnWelsh , absolutely, like in stopwatches notation and, now that you make me think about it, also the GPS coordinates.
    – Stephane Rolland
    Commented May 17, 2013 at 11:19
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    A "second" is, quite literally, a "second minute". Therefore the second get the double quote/prime/whatever you wish to call it. (A "minute" is a minute part of an hour or degree.)
    – Hot Licks
    Commented Feb 10, 2015 at 23:01

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It's not particularly common for expressions of time.

It's similar to degrees-minutes-seconds: instead of decimal degrees (38.897212°,-77.036519°) you write (38° 53′ 49.9632″, -77° 2′ 11.4678″). Both are derived from a sexagesimal counting system such as that devised in Ancient Babylon: the single prime represents the first sexagesimal division and the second the next, and so on. 17th-century astronomers used a third division of 1/60th of a second.

The advantage of using minute and second symbols for time is that it obviously expresses a duration rather than a time.

From the time 01:00:00 to the time 02:34:56 is a duration of 1 hour, 34 minutes and 56 seconds (1h 34′ 56″)

Prime markers start single and are multiplied for susbsequent appearances, so minutes use a single prime ′ and seconds use a double-prime ″. They are pronounced minutes and seconds respectively in the case of durations like this.

Note that a prime ′ is not a straight-apostrophe ' or a printer's apostrophe ’, although straight-apostrophes are a reasonable approximation and printer's apostrophes do occur as well.

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  • So the coordinate system came first, and the notation was borrowed for recording elapsed times?
    – David John Welsh
    Commented May 17, 2013 at 11:18
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    And for one hour, five minutes, 30 seconds, could I write 1°5'30" ?
    – Stephane Rolland
    Commented May 17, 2013 at 11:21
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    @StephaneRolland No. ° is for degrees. Use h for hours.
    – Andrew Leach ♦
    Commented May 17, 2013 at 11:23
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    @TrevorD: No. Basically nobody in England writes times likes this. We write 1hr 5m 30s or 01:05:30 (HH:mm:ss.fff)
    – Matt
    Commented May 17, 2013 at 13:21
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    Where I most remember seeing prime for minutes (of time) and double-prime for seconds is on album liners when I was a kid. This was the standard way of showing the duration of a track on an album.
    – user109233
    Commented Feb 10, 2015 at 21:42
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The ' and " are widely used in maps. They're hardly ever used to indicate time anymore. If you use them, be prepared for some strange looks.

The best option is hh:mm:ss. If you're only showing a pair of digits, the context will tell the reader whether it's hh:mm or mm:ss.

You can also suffix the digits with the unit, such as 1h 12m 23s but this gets long and if you're aligning many such intervals it can be difficult to compare.

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