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"Noon" used to occur at about 3 pm.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/noon-history-ninth-prayer-hour-nonesWhat time Is 'noon'?
It used to be later in the day.
[...]
But there was once a time when noon referred to a different time of day—and that fact is reflected in the word’s etymology.
Noon takes a path through Middle and Old English, where nōn denoted the ninth hour from sunrise. That word derives from the Latin nonus, meaning “ninth,” related to novem, the word for the number nine. If you mark sunrise at approximately 6:00 in the morning, that puts noon at around what we would now call 3:00 P.M. Romans called what we now call noon meridiem, literally the “middle of the day”; hence our designations A.M. (for ante meridiem) and P.M. (post meridiem) for the hours before and after the noon hour.
So what was special about that ninth hour? In Christian liturgy, the nones, or ninth hour, was one of the three times of day (along with morning and evening) set aside for prayer. The ninth hour is significant at numerous points in Scripture; in the Gospel of Mark, the hours leading up to the crucifixion of Jesus is described as “darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour” in the King James Version and as lasting “until three in the afternoon” in the New International Version.
It is believed that the time allotted for this prayer gradually moved up earlier in the day, perhaps at the urgency of monks who would could only end their fast after the prayer was completed. That time known as noon eventually settled on the time when the sun was in the middle of the sky.
[...]
It used to be later in the day.
[...]
But there was once a time when noon referred to a different time of day—and that fact is reflected in the word’s etymology.
Noon takes a path through Middle and Old English, where nōn denoted the ninth hour from sunrise. That word derives from the Latin nonus, meaning “ninth,” related to novem, the word for the number nine. If you mark sunrise at approximately 6:00 in the morning, that puts noon at around what we would now call 3:00 P.M. Romans called what we now call noon meridiem, literally the “middle of the day”; hence our designations A.M. (for ante meridiem) and P.M. (post meridiem) for the hours before and after the noon hour.
So what was special about that ninth hour? In Christian liturgy, the nones, or ninth hour, was one of the three times of day (along with morning and evening) set aside for prayer. The ninth hour is significant at numerous points in Scripture; in the Gospel of Mark, the hours leading up to the crucifixion of Jesus is described as “darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour” in the King James Version and as lasting “until three in the afternoon” in the New International Version.
It is believed that the time allotted for this prayer gradually moved up earlier in the day, perhaps at the urgency of monks who would could only end their fast after the prayer was completed. That time known as noon eventually settled on the time when the sun was in the middle of the sky.
[...]
2 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
It's nice reading something today that isn't depressing or enraging me.
Thanks for posting this. 
Last edited Fri Jan 9, 2026, 09:21 PM - Edit history (1)
The news is more depressing now than I've ever seen. Little distractions, here and there, seem to help my mental health just a little.