DAY

For the part of the day when there is daylight, see Daytime. For other uses, see Day
(disambiguation).

A quarter-day cycle at Midtown Manhattan, from afternoon to dusk

A day is the time period of a full rotation of the Earth with respect to the Sun. On
average, this is 24 hours (86,400 seconds). As a day passes at a given location it
experiences morning, noon, afternoon, evening, and night. This daily cycle
drives circadian rhythms in many organisms, which are vital to many life processes.

A collection of sequential days is organized into calendars as dates, almost always

into weeks, months and years. A solar calendar organizes dates based on the Sun's
annual cycle, giving consistent start dates for the four seasons from year to year.
A lunar calendar organizes dates based on the Moon's lunar phase.

In common usage, a day starts at midnight, written as 00:00 or 12:00 am in 24- or 12-
hour clocks, respectively. Because the time of midnight varies between locations, time
zones are set up to facilitate the use of a uniform standard time. Other conventions are
sometimes used, for example the Jewish religious calendar counts days from sunset to
sunset, so the Jewish Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday. In astronomy, a day
begins at noon so that observations throughout a single night are recorded as
happening on the same day.

In specific applications, the definition of a day is slightly modified, such as in the SI day
(exactly 86,400 seconds) used for computers and standards keeping, local mean
time accounting of the Earth's natural fluctuation of a solar day, and stellar
day and sidereal day (using the celestial sphere) used for astronomy. In most countries
outside of the tropics, daylight saving time is practiced, and each year there will be one
23-hour civil day and one 25-hour civil day. Due to slight variations in the rotation of the
Earth, there are rare times when a leap second will get inserted at the end of
a UTC day, and so while almost all days have a duration of 86,400 seconds, there are
these exceptional cases of a day with 86,401 seconds (in the half-century spanning
1972 through 2022, there have been a total of 27 leap seconds that have been inserted,
so roughly once every other year).

Etymology[edit]
The term comes from the Old English term dæġ (/dæj/), with its cognates such
as dagur in Icelandic, Tag in German,
and dag in Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and Dutch – all stemming from a Proto-
Germanic root *dagaz.[1] As of October 17, 2015, day is the 205th most common word
in American English,[2] and the 210th most common in English English.[2]

Definitions[edit]
Apparent and mean solar day[edit]

Earth's rotation imaged by Deep Space Climate

Observatory, showing axis tilt
Several definitions of this universal human concept are used according to context, need,
and convenience. Besides the day of 24 hours (86,400 seconds), the word day is used
for several different spans of time based on the rotation of the Earth around its axis. An
important one is the solar day, the time it takes for the Sun to return to its culmination
point (its highest point in the sky). Due to an orbit's eccentricity, the Sun resides in one
of the orbit's foci instead of the middle. Consequently, due to Kepler's second law, the
planet travels at different speeds at various positions in its orbit, and thus a solar day is
not the same length of time throughout the orbital year. Because the Earth moves along
an eccentric orbit around the Sun while the Earth spins on an inclined axis, this period
can be up to 7.9 seconds more than (or less than) 24 hours. In recent decades, the
average length of a solar day on Earth has been about 86,400.002 seconds[3] (24.000
000 6 hours). There are currently about 365.2421875 solar days in one mean tropical
year.

Ancient custom has a new day starting at either the rising or setting of the Sun on the
local horizon (Italian reckoning, for example, being 24 hours from sunset, old style).
[4]
The exact moment of, and the interval between, two sunrises or sunsets depends on
the geographical position (longitude and latitude, as well as altitude), and the time
of year (as indicated by ancient hemispherical sundials).
A more constant day can be defined by the Sun passing through the local meridian,
which happens at local noon (upper culmination) or midnight (lower culmination). The
exact moment is dependent on the geographical longitude, and to a lesser extent on the
time of the year. The length of such a day is nearly constant (24 hours ± 30 seconds).
This is the time as indicated by modern sundials.

A further improvement defines a fictitious mean Sun that moves with constant speed
along the celestial equator; the speed is the same as the average speed of the real Sun,
but this removes the variation over a year as the Earth moves along its orbit around the
Sun (due to both its velocity and its axial tilt).

In terms of Earth's rotation, the average day length is about 360.9856°. A day lasts for
more than 360° of rotation because of the Earth's revolution around the Sun. With a full
year being slightly more than 360 days, the Earth's daily orbit around the Sun is slightly
less than 1°, so the day is slightly less than 361° of rotation.

Elsewhere in the Solar System or other parts of the universe, a day is a full rotation of
other large astronomical objects with respect to its star.[5]

Civil day[edit]
For civil purposes, a common clock time is typically defined for an entire region based
on the local mean solar time at a central meridian. Such time zones began to be
adopted about the middle of the 19th century when railroads with regularly occurring
schedules came into use, with most major countries having adopted them by 1929. As
of 2015, throughout the world, 40 such zones are now in use: the central zone, from
which all others are defined as offsets, is known as UTC±00, which uses Coordinated
Universal Time (UTC).

The most common convention starts the civil day at midnight: this is near the time of
the lower culmination of the Sun on the central meridian of the time zone. Such a day
may be called a calendar day.

A day is commonly divided into 24 hours, with each hour being made up of 60 minutes,
and each minute composed of 60 seconds.

Sidereal day[edit]
Main articles: Earth's rotation § Stellar day, Sidereal time, and Rotation period
 Rotation of the dwarf planet Ceres
A sidereal day or stellar day is the span of time it takes for the Earth to make one
entire rotation[6] with respect to the celestial background or a distant star (assumed to be
fixed).[7] Measuring a day as such is used in astronomy.[7] A sidereal day is about 4
minutes less than a solar day of 24 hours (23 hours 56 minutes and 4.09 seconds), or
0.99726968 of a solar day of 24 hours.[8] There are about 366.2422 stellar days in one
mean tropical year (one stellar day more than the number of solar days).[9]

Besides a stellar day on Earth, other bodies in the Solar System have day times, the
durations of these being:[10][11]

Name Daylength (hours)

Mercury 4222.6

Venus 2802

Earth's
708.7
Moon

Mars 24.7

Ceres 9[12]–9.1[13]

Jupiter 9.9

Saturn 10.7

Uranus 17.2

Neptune 16.1

Pluto 153.3
In the International System of Units[edit]
Main article: International System of Units
In the International System of Units (SI), a day not an official unit, but is accepted for
use with SI.[14] A day, with symbol d, is defined using SI units as 86,400 seconds; the
second is the base unit of time in SI units. In 1967–68, during the 13th CGPM
(Resolution 1),[15] the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) redefined a
second as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the
transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom".
[16]
This makes the SI-based day last exactly 794,243,384,928,000 of those periods.

In decimal and metric time[edit]

Main articles: decimal time and Metric time

Decimal clock face, made in around the start of the 19th

century
Various decimal or metric time proposals have been made, but do not redefine the day,
and use the day or sidereal day as a base unit. Metric time uses metric prefixes to keep
time. It uses the day as the base unit, and smaller units being fractions of a day: a
metric hour (deci) is 1⁄10 of a day; a metric minute (milli) is 1⁄1000 of a day; etc.[17] Similarly, in
decimal time, the length of a day is static to normal time. A day is also split into 10
hours, and 10 days comprise a décade – the equivalent of a week. 3 décades make a
month.[18]: 35 Various decimal time proposals which do not redefine the day: Henri de
Sarrauton's proposal kept days, and subdivided hours into 100 minutes;[18]: 42 in
Mendizábal y Tamborel's proposal, the sidereal day was the basic unit, with
subdivisions made upon it;[18]: 42–43 and Rey-Pailhade's proposal divided the day 100 cés.
[18]: 42

Other definitions[edit]
The word refers to various similarly defined ideas, such as:

Full day

 24 hours (exactly) (a nychthemeron)

  A day counting approximation, for example "See you in three days." or "the
following day"
 The full day covering both the dark and light periods, beginning from the start
of the dark period or from a point near the middle of the dark period
 A full dark and light period, sometimes called a nychthemeron in English,
from the Greek for night-day;[19] or more colloquially the term 24 hours. In
other languages, 24 hours is also often used. Other languages also have a
separate word for a full day.
 Part of a date: the day of the year (doy) in ordinal dates, day of the month
(dom) in calendar dates or day of the week (dow) in week dates.
 Time regularly spend at paid work on a single work day, cf. man-
day and workweek.
Daytime

 The period of light when the Sun is above the local horizon (that is, the time
period from sunrise to sunset)
 The time period from 06:00–18:00 (6:00 am – 6:00 pm) or 21:00 (9:00 pm) or
another fixed clock period overlapping or offset from other time periods such
as "morning", "afternoon", or "evening".
 The time period from first-light "dawn" to last-light "dusk".
Other

 A specific period of the day, which may vary by context, such as "the school
day" or "the work day".
Variations in length[edit]
Further information: Leap second and Tidal acceleration
Mainly due to tidal deceleration – the Moon's gravitational pull slowing down the Earth's
rotation – the Earth's rotational period is slowing.[20] Because of the way the second is
defined, the mean length of a solar day is now about 86,400.002 seconds, and is
increasing by about 2 milliseconds per century.[21]

Since the rotation rate of the Earth is slowing, the length of a SI second fell out of sync
with a second derived from the rotational period.[20] This arose the need for leap
seconds, which insert extra seconds into Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).[20] Although
typically 86,400 SI seconds in duration, a civil day can be either 86,401 or 86,399 SI
seconds long on such a day. Other than the two-millisecond variation from tidal
deceleration, other factors minutely affect the day's length, which creates an irregularity
in the placement of leap seconds.[22] Leap seconds are announced in advance by
the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS), which
measures the Earth's rotation and determines whether a leap second is necessary.

Geological day lengths[edit]

Discovered by paleontologist John W. Wells, the day lengths of geological periods have
been estimated by measuring sedimentation rings in coral fossils,[23][21] due to some
biological systems being affected by the tide.[21] The length of a day at the Earth's
formation is estimated at 6 hours.[21] Arbab I. Arbab plotted day lengths over time and
found a curved line.[21] Arbab attributed this to the change of water volume present
affecting Earth's rotation.[21]

Geological Number of days per

Date Duration of the day
period year[23]

Present Current 365 24 hours

−100 million 23 hours and 20

Cretaceous 380
years minutes

−200 million 22 hours and 40

Triassic 390
years minutes

−300 million
Carboniferous 400 22 hours
years

−400 million 21 hours and 20

Devonian 410
years minutes

−500 million 20 hours and 40

Cambrian 425
years minutes

Boundaries[edit]

Sun and Moon, Hartmann Schedel's Nuremberg

Chronicle, 1493
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For most diurnal animals, the day naturally begins at dawn and ends at sunset.
Humans, with their cultural norms and scientific knowledge, have employed several
different conceptions of the day's boundaries.

In the Hebrew Bible, Genesis 1:5 defines a day in terms of "evening" and "morning"
before recounting the creation of the Sun to illuminate it: "And God called the light Day,
and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day."
The Jewish day begins at either sunset or nightfall (when three second-magnitude stars
appear). Medieval Europe also followed this tradition, known as Florentine reckoning: In
this system, a reference like "two hours into the day" meant two hours after sunset and
thus times during the evening need to be shifted back one calendar day in modern
reckoning. Days such as Christmas Eve, Halloween (“All Hallows’ Eve”), and the Eve
of Saint Agnes are remnants of the older pattern when holidays began during the prior
evening.

The common convention among the ancient Romans,[24] ancient Chinese[25] and in
modern times is for the civil day to begin at midnight, i.e. 00:00, and to last a full 24
hours until 24:00, i.e. 00:00 of the next day.

In ancient Egypt the day was reckoned from sunrise to sunrise.

Prior to 1926, Turkey had two time systems: Turkish, counting the hours from sunset,
and French, counting the hours from midnight.

Parts[edit]
See also: Category:Parts of a day
Humans have divided the day in rough periods, which can have cultural implications,
and other effects on humans' biological processes. The parts of the day do not have set
times; they can vary by lifestyle or hours of daylight in a given place.[26]

Daytime[edit]
Main article: Daytime
Daytime is the part of the day during which sunlight directly reaches the ground,
assuming that there are no obstacles. The length of daytime averages slightly more
than half of the 24-hour day. Two effects make daytime on average longer than night.
The Sun is not a point but has an apparent size of about 32 minutes of arc. Additionally,
the atmosphere refracts sunlight in such a way that some of it reaches the ground even
when the Sun is below the horizon by about 34 minutes of arc. So the first light reaches
the ground when the centre of the Sun is still below the horizon by about 50 minutes of
arc.[27] Thus, daytime is on average around 7 minutes longer than 12 hours.[28]

Daytime is further divided into morning, afternoon, and evening. Morning occurs
between sunrise and noon.[29] Afternoon occurs between noon and sunset,[30] or between
noon and the start of evening. This period of time sees human's highest body
temperature,[31] an increase of traffic collisions,[32] and a decrease of productivity.
 Evening begins around 5 or 6 pm, or when the sun sets, and ends when one goes to
[33]

bed.[34][35][36]

Twilight[edit]
Main article: Twilight

Twilight is the period before sunrise and after sunset in which there is natural light but
no direct sunlight.[37] The morning twilight begins at dawn and ends at sunrise, while the
evening twilight begins at sunset and ends at dusk. Both periods of twilight can be
divided into civil twilight, nautical twilight, and astronomical twilight. Civil twilight is when
the sun is up to 6 degrees below the horizon; nautical when it is up to 12 degrees
below, and astronomical when it is up to 18 degrees below.[38]

Night in art
Night[edit]
Main article: Night
Night is the period in which the sky is dark;[39] the period between dusk and dawn when
no light from the sun is visible.[40] Light pollution during night can impact human and
animal life, for example by disrupting sleep.[41][42]

See also[edit]
 Determination of the day of the week
 Holiday
 ISO 8601
 Season, for a discussion of daylight and darkness at various latitudes
 Synodic day
 World Meteorological day