Word.ws English Dictionary

o-dark-thirty

o-dark-thirty noun: the wee hours.

Noun

o-dark-thirty (uncountable)

  1. (informal) The wee hours.

Origin of o-dark-thirty

By analogy with "o-three-thirty" (0330), "o-four-thirty" (0430), "o-five-thirty" (0530), and similar times as often expressed on the 24-hour clock—early morning hours that archetypally share the characteristics of a still-dark/nighttime sky and a distastefully early time of rising/arousal; the letter o in these terms comes from the /oʊ/-for-zero pronunciation, which (despite its conflated nature) is idiomatically widespread (just as it also is in "two-point-oh" for "2.0", for example); thus, it is not homologous to the o' in o'clock.

Questions about o-dark-thirty

What does o-dark-thirty mean?
O-dark-thirty means the wee hours.
What part of speech is o-dark-thirty?
O-dark-thirty is a noun.

Words near o-dark-thirty in the dictionary

  1. O-1s
  2. O-ch'eng
  3. o-chem
  4. O-chou
  5. o-CNB
  6. o-dark-thirty
  7. o-face
  8. o-faces
  9. o-fer
  10. o-fers
  11. o-grade

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: o-dark-thirty (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “o-dark-thirty.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/o-dark-thirty. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.