In the working world, the established time for lunch is noon, currently fixed at twelve o’clock but formerly the ninth hour of the day, the ninth hour being three o’clock in the afternoon. The convoluted history of noon extends back two thousand years to when the ancient Romans reckoned the hours of the day not from midnight but from sunrise, which in southern latitudes typically occurs at what we would now call six in the morning. Accordingly, under this Roman system, the nona hora or ninth hour occurred nine hours after dawn, making it, under our current system, three o’clock in the afternoon. What then happened was that nona—or noon as it was later pronounced—became associated with lunch time; the term noonmeat even arose in the eleventh century as the name for this meal, a term used as late as the nineteenth century, although by then it had been corrupted to nummet. As eating habits changed, lunch came to be eaten earlier and earlier, and thus by the fourteenth century the meal known as noonmeat or noon had shifted from three o’clock to its current hour, twelve o’clock. This shift was assisted by the demise of the Roman system for telling time, and by the appearance in the sixteenth century of the word lunch, which, along with dinner, became the main term for the midday meal. Noon therefore lost its specific meal sense and became merely a fixed-hour in the day, as it originally had been. In phrases such as high noon and solar noon, the word noon is also used as a synonym for midday, the moment—slightly different each day of the year—when the sun reaches its zenith.