the.com/forenoon
the morning's overlooked older sibling, sulking quietly between dawn and the lunch bell
means The part of the day before noon — that is, the morning, or more precisely the stretch between sunrise and midday.
from A plain English compound: "fore" (before, the same word lurking in forehead and forecast) joined to "noon." "Noon" itself has a curious past — it comes from Latin nona (hora), the "ninth hour" of the Roman day, which fell around 3 p.m.; over the centuries the hour of prayer drifted earlier until "noon" settled at midday. So "forenoon" means simply "before noon," a tidy late-medieval coinage that has been quietly losing ground to "morning" ever since.
- Time slot
- Roughly 9 a.m. to noon, the productive stretch
- Nautical life
- Ships split this into formal watch periods
- Old English
- Coined before clocks made the word redundant
- Legal use
- Still appears in some court scheduling language