Talk:Second

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Second article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the subject of the article.

Add new text under old text. New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help. Start a new topic Assume good faith Be polite and avoid personal attacks Be welcoming to newcomers Seek dispute resolution if needed Article policies Neutral point of view No original research Verifiability

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Archives: 1, 2Auto-archiving period: 3 months

This article is written in American English, which has its own spelling conventions (center, color, defense, realize, traveled) and some terms may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.

This  level-4 vital article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Time Top‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Time, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Time on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.TimeWikipedia:WikiProject TimeTemplate:WikiProject TimeTime Top This article has been rated as Top-importance on the project's importance scale.

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Fourth (time). The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 December 7#Fourth (time) until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Cnilep (talk) 07:51, 7 December 2020 (UTC)Reply

The commentary I added regarding the SI multiples of the second was not redundant, should be restored, and ideally be elaborated on by editors with more specialised knowledge about the subjects than me. Considering: that Wikipedia is designed to be broadly accessible, that many readers are likely to have little or no familiarity with extremely large or small numbers or with thinking about timescales well outside the range of human experience, that some readers will have been redirected to this page by clicking on links marked e.g. "zeptosecond" or "exasecond", and that many of these examples are just plain cool and interesting, which is an important consideration in public education (if you don't think mine specifically were [I wasn't all that happy with the monarch reign lengths TBH] please suggest your own!), it seems entirely appropriate to me that the article spend a paragraph or so giving a sense of what each of the SI multiples means in practice and why anyone would be interested in them, rather than simply state the technical definition. This would not be "redundant". At the time of making this post, the multiples section contains no information besides what could be inferred by applying the normal prefix system to this unit, plus the comment that the prefixes representing numbers greater than one are rarely used in practice, some hyperlinks I (originally) added, and the multiples hectosecond and up translated into more familiar units. And even here, a quantity like 31,700 years (much less 31.7 trillion years) will be a meaningless and abstract number to many readers and some context should be added.Ava Eva Thornton (talk) 03:26, 2 March 2022 (UTC)Reply

Hello. Thanks for starting a discussion. If you want to remove the table and replace it with a bulleted list, that would be fine with me. That would remove the redundancy and provide a place for anecdotal facts. Please do not create a subsection for every multiple. It bloats the table of contents. Subsections should be substantial and not one or two sentences. Constant314 (talk) 03:35, 2 March 2022 (UTC)Reply

Second#Future redefinition and Atomic clock#Redefining the second are the same exact section. They need to be merged to one page. Nerdwizard (talk) 04:32, 10 April 2023 (UTC)Reply

Duplication is acceptable. There is no policy against it. However, you are welcome to suggest changes. Constant314 (talk) 04:41, 10 April 2023 (UTC)Reply

Digitorologues (digital clocks and watches/smartwatches [sphygmodigitorologues/cybersphygmodigitorologues]) do not accept horal formats, as "23:59:60" and "24:00:00", exemplarly, because the hour 24, the minute 60 and the second 60 do not exist. The first moment of a digitorologue is 00:00:00 and its last "23:59:59". "Midnights" ever are "hour zeroes" and "noons" "hour twelves".

200.155.120.220 (talk) 22:37, 18 February 2025 (UTC)Reply

This article is about the second, and not about clocks. Constant314 (talk) 23:02, 18 February 2025 (UTC)Reply

Explication: The horal formats use values from "00" to "23", the minutine values from "00" to "59" and the secondine (secundine) values from "00" to "59".

200.155.120.220 (talk) 23:15, 18 February 2025 (UTC)Reply

There is a difference between writing "24:00:00" and displaying the same on a clock. In writing, it refers to the midnight at the end of a day. On a clock, it would be displayed for an entire second, until an instant before 24:00:01. So it could be correct in writing but incorrect to display on a clock.

"23:59:60" is correct during a leap second, although most clocks do not display leap seconds. Jc3s5h (talk) 03:13, 19 February 2025 (UTC)Reply

Exemplarly, cybercytotelephones (cybernetical cellular telephones) do not display time formats, as "23:59:60" and "24:00:00", exemplarly. Many cybercytotelephones provide horal applications who include seconds in its times. Its times are cybernetically actualized.

The conventional use of hours ("00"-"23"), minutes ("00"-"59") and seconds ("00"-"59") in digitorologues is universal (global, mondial/mundial).

189.50.186.221 (talk) 09:54, 19 February 2025 (UTC)Reply

Translated into idiomatic English from overly-formal and overly-neologistic English (or from English generated by a formal/literal translation from another language, rather than an idiomatic translation from that language), that's:

As an example, smartphones do not display times as "23:59:60" and "24:00:00". Many smartphones have clock applications that show seconds. Those times are calculated.

The conventional use of hours ("00"-"23"), minutes ("00"-"59") and seconds ("00"-"59") in digital clocks is used around the world.

As Jc3s5h noted, "23:59:60" is correct during a leap second - see, for example, this page from the ITU-R or ITU-R Report TF.2511-0 "Content and structure of time signals to be disseminated by radiocommunication systems and various aspects of current and potential future reference time scales, including their impacts and applications in radiocommunication".

However, the POSIX standard doesn't support that, and the two operating systems used in the vast majority of smartphones - "Bionic/Linux", a/k/a "Android", and iOS - are, while not certified as POSIX-compliant, are Unix-like at the lower layers, so their conversion from Unix time to displayable time (that's the "calculated" in question) does not convert to displayable 23:59:60, so, in practice, you won't see that on smartphones (unless somebody jailbreaks them and switches to the version of the tz database that includes leap seconds, or a vendor offers that choice).

In any case, is there a change you wish to see made to the page Second? If so, what is that change? (In the changed text, please use terminology generally used in English-speaking countries, as this is the English Wikipedia, rather than, to pick a hypothetical example, terminology used in Brazil, translated from Brazilian Portuguese to English formally and literally rather than idiomatically.)

If not, this all seems to fall under the heading of WP:NOTFORUM, and thus no further discussion is needed. Guy Harris (talk) 19:20, 19 February 2025 (UTC)Reply

You have reason over this. I confused "display" with "exist". I thank you for these informations.

Good Vesper (canonical hour) in BRT!

2804:18:905:A59D:10C9:AFFF:FEFA:9360 (talk) 21:02, 19 February 2025 (UTC)Reply

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:2018–2024 Arab protests which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 04:10, 24 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

which affects this page This is not at all clear. Some earlier move discussions involved the phrase "Second Arab Spring" and pages related thereto, but "Second" as in "ordinal number 2" is not the same as "Second" as in "the amount of time such that the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom is 9,192,631,770 cycles per second". Guy Harris (talk) 06:15, 24 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

That bot notice was caused by this edit, which was quickly corrected. Graham87 (talk) 09:29, 20 May 2026 (UTC)Reply