standard time

noun

: the time of a region or country that is established by law or general usage as civil time (see civil sense 5)

… the advent of the railway system and its demand for accurate timetables created the need for standard time and GMT became the legal standard time of Britain in 1880.

—John Sallnow

specifically : the mean time of a meridian that is a multiple of 15 arbitrarily applied to a local area or to one of the 24 time zones and designated as a number of hours earlier or later than Greenwich Mean Time

At a little after nine Central Standard Time on the night of Monday, April 13, 1970 there was, high in the western sky, a tiny flare of light that in some respects resembled a star exploding far away in our galaxy.

—Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr.

Examples of standard time in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

The Sunshine Protection Act of 2021, which was created to make daylight saving time the new, permanent standard time, was unanimously passed by the U.S. Senate in 2022 but it was not passed by the U.S. House of Representatives. —Chris Sims, The Courier-Journal, 25 Oct. 2024

By summer, public approval had plummeted, and in early October Congress voted to switch back to standard time. —Cnn.com Wire Service, The Mercury News, 14 Oct. 2024

When the clocks shift to standard time, sunrise will occur before 7am and sunset will be around 5:30pm, per NOAA. —Tasha Tsiaperas, Axios, 6 Sep. 2024

Some states have opposing legislation currently under consideration—SB 1200 in Oklahoma, for example, would make daylight saving time permanent while SB 69 would establish standard time in the state. —Mary Whitfill Roeloffs, Forbes, 19 Sep. 2024

Word History

First Known Use

1809, in the meaning defined above

Kids Definition

standard time

noun

: the time established by law or by general usage over a region or country