Noon is twelve o'clock in the middle of the day. At noon, before noon, the noon sun. It is interchangeable with midday, though noon is commoner in American English and midday in British.
It is the safest word for twelve in the day, because 12 p.m. confuses almost everybody — twelve noon is the phrase that removes all doubt, and contracts use it for exactly that reason. Note afternoon, which is literally after noon and is one of the few English compounds where the meaning is completely transparent. And high noon, meaning the moment of confrontation, comes from the film and is now used well outside westerns.
1nounnoonTwelve o'clock in the middle of the day.
“The service starts at noon.”
noon is a time of day.
Also accepted in games: midday
Latin nona hora was the ninth hour after dawn — about three in the afternoon, and the hour of a monastic prayer. The prayer, and then the meal after it, drifted earlier over the centuries until nones landed at midday, and the word moved with it. Noon is a clock error three hours wide, fossilised.
Latin
nōna — ninth hour
Old English
nōn — the ninth hour
Middle English
noen
English, today
noon
Built from
From Middle English noen, none, non, from Old English nōn (“the ninth hour”), from a Germanic borrowing of classical Latin nōna (“ninth hour”) (short for nōna hōra), feminine of nōnus (“ninth”). Cognate with Dutch noen, obsolete German Non, Norwegian non.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA