History Main / Microts

* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIV'' uses fictional measurements of distance in the form of "ilms", "fulms", "yalms", and "malms", which are rough approximations to inches, feet, yards, and miles, respectively. It also uses fictional measurements of weight with "onze", "ponze", and "tonze", which correlate to ounces, pounds, and tons. While Eorzea's measurements of time closely mirror the real world, hours are commonly referred to as "bells", and months as "moons".

-->--''Series/RedDwarf'', "Emohawk"

* Starting with ''Film/StarTrekIIITheSearchForSpock'' and continuing on at least one episode of ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'', Klingon Battlecuiser crews call out the distance to their targets in "Kellecams". (Or "killicams". Or "kilicams". There doesn't seem to me much agreement on the spelling. As they're translating from Klingon, the closest would probably be something like qelI'qam.)
** Beginning with ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'', stardates were (sort of) standardized to a year being 1,000 units long, with each unit being subdivided into 10 subunits. That would mean that 1 unit is equal to roughly 8 hours, a subunit is roughly 48 minutes, while a day is 3 units. Thus, the launch date of the ''Enterprise-D'', stardate 41153.7, correlates to February 20, 2364 at 5:36 am.

** An in-joke in the Arch Linux community are [[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Kiloseconds kiloseconds.]]

** Dogs and wolves in ''Literature/SurvivorDogs'' refer to the seasons as Tree Flower, Long Light, Red Leaf, and Ice Wind. Morning is "sunup" while the night is referred to as "no-sun". Canines measure time in moons, with one month being "one full journey of [[AnthropomorphicPersonification Moon-Dog]]", while smaller units such as a day would be "one Sun-Dog journey".

** Martian time isn't that bad; the 24-hour-40-minute day will let you keep a reasonably stable sleep cycle that's consistent with the rhythms of the human body. Heaven help you if you were dealing with a planet that has 16-hour or 30-hour days, though...
** Although continually sleeping 40 minutes later every day means that after about two-and-a-half weeks your AM/PM has completely flipped over and you're going to bed around noon and getting up in the late evening.
*** Another ''Film/MenInBlack'' joke:
---->'''Zed:''' The twins keep us on Centaurian time, standard thirty-seven hour day. Give it a few months. You'll get used to it. Or you'll have a psychotic episode.

* ''ComicBook/LegendsOfTheDeadEarth'': In ''Franchise/WonderWoman'' Annual #5, the Unremembered measure time in cycles. 18 years in the Old Earth calendar equates to 70 cycles.

* In ''Webcomic/EscapeFromTerra'' most Belters use a decimalized calendar and time-keeping system designed by the Mars colonists. Particularly "centimes" (about 14.8 minutes, if my math is correct) and "decadays" (10 Martian days).

* ''Film/{{Coneheads}}'': Seven Remulakian zerls correspond to approximately 16 earth years. Beldar and Prymat are understandably worried when the home planet said it would take that long for a rescue ship to arrive.
* In ''Film/ManOfSteel'', Zod and his followers are sentenced to the Phantom Zone for 300 "cycles". These are persumerly Kryptonian years, but since no matter how much time they measure, Krypton [[DoomedHometown doesn't have 300 of them left]], so it quickly become a moot point.

* Deliberately averted in the novel based on ''Literature/{{Nightfall}}''. The author says this is to simplify readng the narrative. So the narrative uses words like "mile" "hour" and so forth. They do specifically say there may not be 60 minutes in an hour.
* In Creator/IsaacAsimov's Robot City series (by Rob Chilson, William F. Wu, Arthur Byron Cover, Michael P. Kube-[=McDowell=] and Mike [=McQuay=]) the robots use normal time units, but since the days in the titular city are of a different length, the human heroes get metric watches dividing the day into decades and centades.

* Inverted in ''Literature/TheWheelOfTime,'' where a ten-day period is called a week. This is mentioned exactly once in the story, in an offhand mention going something like, "Four more two-day festivals scheduled for this week," leading the casual, non-glossary-reading reader to believe that Robert Jordan was an ''idiot.''
** Many fans have been confused by the combination of the above and Moiraine's conversation with Nynaeve about when she began channelling, where she asks if Nynaeve experienced certain things in "a week or ten days." So apparently she meant [[YouAreTheTranslatedForeignWord "a week, i.e. ten days"]].
** This is due to the fact in [[FanNickname Randland]] most people who aren`t merchants pay little mind to the calendar, preferring to go by seasons. This is so prevalent that most of the viewpoint characters are unaware of the ''names of the days of the week''.
*** Which is understandable since most of those viewpoint characters are from a backwater village in the middle of nowhere, two of them have memories of people who died a long time ago, one has a mental link to animals, and others are from cultures that probably have an entirely different calendar.

* Creator/MercedesLackey's ''Literature/HeraldsOfValdemar'' books call an hour a "candlemark". In her ''[[Literature/TheObsidianTrilogy Obsidian Trilogy]]'', characters from a certain city reckon time in units of "bells", each of which is two hours. The city is chock-full of bell towers that all ring on that interval.

* There's an example in the first chapter of ''Manga/{{Barrage}}'': the protagonist is said to be earning 7 [[ArtisticLicensePhysics quarks]] an hour, with a footnote saying a quark is worth about as much as a yen (¥7 ≈ $0.09). That's no doubt meant to tell the readers how poor he is, and presumably that's based on [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity purchasing power]] as opposed to exchange rate, as Earth is implied not to exist in that universe.

** Dogs and wolves in ''Literature/SurvivorDogs'' refer to the seasons as Tree Flower, Long Light, Red Leaf, and Ice Wind. Daytime is "sunup" while the night is referred to as "no-sun". Canines measure time in moons, with one month being "one full journey of [[AnthropomorphicPersonification Moon-Dog]]".

* Rabbits in ''Literature/WatershipDown'' don't have a clear sense of time. They only have approximations. "Fu Inle" [[TranslationConvention translates]] to "after moonrise".

** Dogs and wolves in ''Literature/SurvivorDogs'' refer to the seasons as Tree Flower, Long Light, Red Leaf, and Ice Wind. Night is referred to as "no-sun".

* In ''Literature/TailchasersSong'' cats have their own way of telling time. Instead of evening, morning, afternoon, etc they have different Hours. "(Hour of) Stretching Sun", "(Hour of) Unfolding Dark", "(Hour of) Deepest Quiet", "(Hour of) Final Dancing", etc. Summer is referred to "Hour of the Smaller Shadows", but other seasons aren't named. A month is an "Eye" (as in Meercat Allmother's, their God's, eye). The moon cycles are referred to as the eye "shutting" and "opening", thus "tomorrow night" is instead "eye-next".

** Dogs and wolves in ''Literature/SurvivorDogs'' refer to the seasons as Tree Flower, Long Light, Red Leaf, and Ice Wind.

* In ''Literature/TailchasersSong'' cats have their own way of telling time. Instead of evening, morning, afternoon, etc they have different Hours. "(Hour of) Stretching Sun", "(Hour of) Unfolding Dark", "(Hour of) Deepest Quiet", "(Hour of) Final Dancing", etc. Summer is referred to "Hour of the Smaller Shadows", but other seasons aren't named. A month is an "Eye" (as in Meercat Allmother's, their god's, eye). The moon cycles are referred to as the eye "shutting" and "opening", thus "tomorrow night" is instead "eye-next".

* The ''ForgottenRealms'' has the "[[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin tenday]]", which some nations call a "ride." Hilarity sometimes ensues due to confusion, when a person says "two rides" and listeners think they mean two days of riding.

* Cats in ''Literature/WarriorCats'' refer to the seasons as Newleaf, Greenleaf, Leaf-fall, and Leaf-bare. They also don't use years like humans. They go by moons. One moon is roughly a month, a half-moon refers to two weeks, and a quarter-moon refers to a week.
* Dogs and wolves in ''Literature/SurvivorDogs'' refer to the seasons as Tree Flower, Long Light, Red Leaf, and Ice Wind.
* Bears in ''Literature/SeekerBears'' have the same moon/month idea as ''Warrior Cats'', but they use different terms for the seasons depending on the species. Polar bears have Snow-Sky, Snow-Melt, and Burn-Sky. Black bears and grizzly bears may share Cold-Earth, Fish-Leap, and Leaf-Time.

* In ''Literature/TailchasersSong'' cats have their own way of telling time. Instead of evening, morning, afternoon, etc they have different Hours. "(Hour of) Stretching Sun", "(Hour of) Unfolding Dark", "(Hour of) Deepest Quiet", "(Hour of) Final Dancing", etc. Summer is referred to "Hour of the Smaller Shadows", but other seasons aren't named. A month is an "Eye" (as in Meercat Allmother's, their god's, eye). The moon cycles are referred to as the eye "shutting" and "opening", thus tomorrow night" is instead "eye-next".