standard time

noun

: the time of a region or country that is established by law or general usage as civil time (see civil sense 5)

… the advent of the railway system and its demand for accurate timetables created the need for standard time and GMT became the legal standard time of Britain in 1880.

—John Sallnow

specifically : the mean time of a meridian that is a multiple of 15 arbitrarily applied to a local area or to one of the 24 time zones and designated as a number of hours earlier or later than Greenwich Mean Time

At a little after nine Central Standard Time on the night of Monday, April 13, 1970 there was, high in the western sky, a tiny flare of light that in some respects resembled a star exploding far away in our galaxy.

—Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr.

Examples of standard time in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

According to a Tuesday memo from the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, the goal is to create a standard time measurement that will help coordinate efforts as humanity returns to the moon for exploration and economic development. —Aimee Picchi, CBS News, 5 Apr. 2024

Over the last few weeks, Oregon and Washington fell shy of advancing respective permanent standard time legislation. —TIME, 9 Mar. 2024

Here's why some doctors say standard time should be permanent In 2022, scientists and government representatives voted to remove leap seconds from UTC by 2035 at an International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) conference in France. —Leah Sarnoff, ABC News, 28 Mar. 2024

On the first Sunday of November, at 2 a.m., clocks fall back an hour to standard time. —Cnn.com Wire Service, The Mercury News, 8 Mar. 2024

Several of those states were also actively considering legislation that would end daylight saving time, but by switching the state to year-round standard time, according to the NCSL. —Diba Mohtasham, NPR, 8 Mar. 2024

The law also established a standard time and allowed the federal government to create five time zones. —Victoria Moorwood, The Enquirer, 6 Mar. 2024

Doctors and scientists argue that standard time is better for our health. —Diba Mohtasham, NPR, 8 Mar. 2024

On Monday, Oregon’s Senate passed Senate Bill 1548, an effort to abolish the annual practice of changing the clocks by one hour from standard time to DST. —Hanh Truong, Sacramento Bee, 6 Mar. 2024

Word History

First Known Use

1809, in the meaning defined above

Kids Definition

standard time

noun

: the time established by law or by general usage over a region or country