Other forms: hours
An hour is sixty minutes, a twenty-fourth of a day. In an hour, half an hour, an hour and a half.
The h is silent, which is why it takes an rather than a — an hour. Rush hour, opening hours, happy hour and office hours are the standard compounds. The eleventh hour means the last possible moment, from a parable in Matthew. Note hourly, meaning every hour or by the hour; and that hours in the plural often means a working period: her hours were cut.
1nounhourSixty minutes.~68%
“The journey takes about an hour and a half in traffic.”
2nounperiodA period of work or opening.~32%
“Her hours were cut from forty to about twenty-five.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 25 sentences found in the wild and placed 25 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
hour is a unit of time.
Greek hora meant any period of time — a season, a time of day. The division of the day into twenty-four came from Egypt and Babylon, and the equal-length hour arrived only with mechanical clocks in the fourteenth century.
Middle English
houre
English, today
hour
From Middle English houre. From Middle English houre, hour, oure, from Old French houre, from Latin hōra (“hour”), from Ancient Greek ὥρα (“any time or period, whether of the year, month, or day”), from Proto-Indo-European yóh₁r̥ (“year, season”). Akin to Old English ġēar (“year”). a doublet of hora and year. Compare horary. Partly displaced native Old English tīd (“time, hour”), whence Modern English tide.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA