The pips on the hour have been marking time for the best part of a century, and plenty of people still set their watch by the one o'clock signal without thinking about it. This page does something narrower and more exact: it counts down to 12:14 pm on your own device's clock, right down to the second.
The figure on this page comes from your own device's clock, checked continuously and recalculated every second against 12:14 pm. There is nothing to press and nothing to set up first — the count is already running by the time the page has finished loading, and it keeps going while you are looking at it.
Twelve o'clock is where the 12-hour clock is at its weakest, since 12 am and 12 pm are read the wrong way round often enough to cause real trouble. Writing a time as 12:14 removes the problem outright, because a 24-hour figure only ever points at one moment in the day.
Common questions
Which clock does it use?
Your own. It reads the local time and time zone from the device you are looking at, so the figure reflects where you actually are rather than a fixed zone written into the page.
Will this alert me when the time arrives?
No. It is a live number rather than an alarm — nothing rings, buzzes or notifies you at zero. If you need to be interrupted at 12:14 pm, set an alarm as well and treat this page as the running total.
Is it affected by the clocks changing?
Only in the sense that your device is. When the change between GMT and BST happens at the end of March and October, the device adjusts and the countdown follows it without anything to do here.
What is 12:14 in the 12-hour clock?
That is 12:14 pm, or fourteen minutes past twelve in the afternoon if you are saying it aloud. From 13:00 onwards, subtracting twelve gives the pm figure — the same moment written three different ways.
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