Military time comes with a small vocabulary of its own. This military time glossary collects the terms that appear in orders, flight plans and shift logs, with a plain explanation of each.
The core terms
Hundred hours: spoken form for a time on the hour, as in 1400, "fourteen hundred". Zulu (Z): Coordinated Universal Time, the shared reference — see Zulu time. Local (L): the time where the unit actually is. Zone letter: a single letter naming a whole-hour offset from UTC, running A to M ahead and N to Y behind, with J reserved for local time. DTG: a date-time group, a compact stamp combining day, time, zone letter and month.
Notation conventions
Four digits, no colon: 0930, not 09:30, in written orders. No AM or PM: the hour number already carries that information. 0000 versus 2400: both name midnight, the first opening a day and the second closing one — covered in is midnight 0000 or 2400. For the spoken conventions see saying military time out loud.