What is AM/PM called?

Question

Hi All,

Thanks for reading.

I know what AM/PM stand for (ante-meridiem and post-meridiem), but what are they called?

For example, if I am building a date/time from some fields, such as date, hour, minute, am/pm, and want the user to be able to select the time from some select menus like 1-12, 00-60, and am/pm, I would name the selects Hour, Minute, and ____ ?

Normally, I just call it AMPM, but there must be a name for this piece of data?

Thanks!

Edit

Perfect - thanks!

Never again will I have to make weird field names like DueTimeHour, DueTimeMinute, and DueTimeAMPMThingy!

Edit 2

Ok, seriously, if somebody felt the need to downvote the question, that's fine, but feel free to add a comment with the reason for your disgruntlement.

Otherwise, the rest of us might think someone out there believes having a firm understanding of the data you are working with is not programming related.

Answer 1

The Unicode standard for date/time formatting calls it "period".

Answer 2

I've always heard them referred to as "12 hour notation" but I'm not sure if that's official.

Answer 3

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-hour_clock seems to think this is called a "period":

The 12-hour clock is a time conversion convention in which the 24 hours of the day are divided into two periods...