To effectively convert military time, you’ll have to be familiar with the military time chart, military time zones, reading, and “speaking” military time. It spans across timezones, cities, states, languages, and in times of crisis, it can save your life. Use the military time converter below to convert military time to standard 12-hour time and vice versa. Distinguishing the two diurnal repetitions of this sequence. The 24-hour clock is a time order that determines the flow of the day from night to night and is divided into 24 hours. This system is the most widely used time format in the world today. However, the 12-hour clock is still common, especially in countries such as Australia, Canada (excluding Quebec), India, the Philippines and the United States. 12 hour time; it is mostly used in voice communication for ease of use, while 24-hour time is preferred for ease of writing. The 24-hour clock is common in the United States and Canada as a military or astronomical clock, as well as in Australia, although rare. In some parts of the world, it is referred to as rail time or continental time. It is also the International standard of time format (ISO 8601). In medicine, 24-hour time is often used to avoid confusion about when an event occurs. Unlike the 12-hour clock used in standard timekeeping, military time does not use AM or PM to indicate whether it is before or after noon. Instead, it uses a four-digit format, where the first two digits indicate the hour and the last two digits indicate the minutes. It was when someone gave me a time that was in the afternoon or evening that I had trouble.