Afternoon

How to spell afternoon

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce afternoon

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does afternoon mean?

1. nounThe period between midday and the evening.

Afternoon in a sentence

• The meeting was rescheduled to the afternoon so everyone could attend.

• She spent the whole afternoon reviewing the budget figures.

Where does afternoon come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is a simple compound of two older English elements: 'after', the native Old English preposition meaning 'following' or 'later than', and 'noon'. The 'noon' half is the surprising part, because it began as the Latin phrase nona hora, meaning 'the ninth hour', which in the Roman reckoning of the day fell in the mid afternoon, around three o'clock. As medieval church services and meal times drifted earlier, the word 'noon' shifted to mean midday, the twelve o'clock point we know today. By the late 1300s English speakers had fused 'after' and 'noon' into a single term for the part of the day between midday and evening. The compound has been spelled as one closed word since the seventeenth century, which is why the only real spelling trap is remembering the doubled letters of 'noon' and the silent join in the middle.

How the word is built

• after (following)
• noon (the midday hour, from Latin nona hora 'ninth hour')