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Kryten: Hmm yes, he's giving us 5 hanaka to decide.
Rimmer: How long's a hanaka?
Kryten: Well, curiously enough, it's exactly the same as one Earth minute.

Fictional universes call for fictional measurements of time. After all, why would an alien culture use the same words for time as an Earth-based culture?

Strangely, 'alien' time units correlate pretty well with Earth time units in the majority of cases. 'Cycle' is the most common of these, usually referring to a year (though sometimes a day).

This can be justified easily enough; aliens probably live on a planet that orbits a star and has a day-night cycle, so they might well have natural units of time corresponding to "day" and "year," though probably not exactly the same length (unless, of course, the planet in question is almost identical to Earth and the star it circles is the same as the Sun, in which case it may be the same distance away and would therefore have about the same length for a year. No accounting for days, though.)

If an alien character doesn't use their own measurements, but instead uses Earth measurements in a jarring manner, they're talking in terms of Two of Your Earth Minutes. If these units are used across multiple worlds or civilizations, they are Standard Time Units. See also Fantastic Measurement System for other fictional units.


Examples:

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    Anime and Manga 
  • There's an example in the first chapter of Barrage: the protagonist is said to be earning 7 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 purchasing power as opposed to exchange rate, as the series takes place in a Constructed World.
  • In Dragon Ball Super, the Grand Priest gives the time until the Tournament of Power and the length of the Tournament itself in fictional units such as takks, explaining that 100 takks equals 48 minutes.

    Comic Books 
  • Superman:
    • In the Bronze Age, comics stated that Kryptonian time was divided into "dendars", their equivalent of a minute that consists of one hundred seconds.
    • The Krypton Chronicles included a glossary explaining several Kryptonian terms and words. A "thrib" is "a very short period of time, equivalent to an Earth second". 10,000 thribo (Kryptonese plurals are created by adding an O to the word) make a "wolu" (equivalent to an Earth hour), and ten woluo make one "zetyar" (one Krypton day). A "lorax" is a Kryptonian "month" of 73 days. There were six loraxo in the year of 438 days.
    • Some months were also named in the stories. In The Great Phantom Peril, Superman learned that Faora Hu-Ul was tried and convicted on the 52nd of Belyuth, in the year 10,000.
    • The Leper from Krypton: In planet Knorr, a chronon is a Knorrian hour, about 40 minutes Earth time.
    • The New Krypton story arc has the Kryptonians using a weird time unit, apparently of an order of magnitude similar to the minute.
  • Transformers:
    • The Transformers (Marvel) introduced two Cybertronian time units: a "Breem" (8.3 minutes) and a "Vorn" (83 years). Apparently, giant shape-shifting robots never bothered with units of time greater than 8.3 minutes and less than 83 years...note 
    • There are also 'orns', with an 'orn' being 'one Cybertronian lunar day'. Which isn't all that helpful, as we're never told how long that lunar day is.
    • That doesn't even begin to do justice to the silliness of Cybertronian units.
  • In Paperinik New Adventures we are shown the Evronian time units: the basic unit is the spetung (6/10 of a second), then we have the secron (10 spetungs/6 seconds), the minutron (100 secrons/10 minutes), the houron (24 minutrons/4 hours), the dayron (12 hourons, 18 in the rink (final dayron in all monthrons but those of Tamit and Hoxon), equivalent to either 2 or 3 days), the monthron (15 dayrons organized in groups of 5, it's 30 or 31 Earth days and start halfway during our months) and the yearhon (12 monthrons, equivalent of an Earth solar year. Starts on 15 august). Yearhons are grouped into millennia, named after the reigning emperor (implying an emperor can live up to one thousand years, at which point its successor will kill him). Due having been created half-jokingly shortly before the fall of the Evronian Empire, Evronian time units appear only in one story. Also, the Evronian calendar has a couple in-jokes: 15 august (Earth equivalent to the start of the Evronian calendar) was the day of publication of the annual special issue (the Evronian calendar was attached to the 1999 special), and the names of the normal days (po, ra, da, qu, pa) are the initials of the phrase "Poche ragazze da quelle parti" ("there's few girls in your neighbourhood"), a joking answer the staff tended to give to particularly strange fan mails.
  • The aliens in the French-Belgian comic The Scrameustache uses "time units" on a few occasions. Their duration is never precisely stated, but it seems to be around a minute.
  • Legends of the Dead Earth:
    • In Robin (1993) Annual #5, time aboard the Generation Ship Gotham is measured in cycles. One cycle is roughly equal to a year.
    • In Wonder Woman Annual #5, the Unremembered measure time in cycles. 18 years in the Old Earth calendar equates to 70 cycles.
  • Star Trek: Early Voyages: In "The Fallen, Part Two", the Chakuun measure time in cycles, which seem to be equivalent to standard years.

    Fan Works 
  • The time system in Ketafa in With Strings Attached (and, later, also in Baravada in The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World) is some strange thing divided into five big chunks, four sets of five smaller chunks, and 400 smaller units. Times are called, very prosaically, “2-3” or “5-5” or whatever. The four never bother to find out anything about it, and the only time it matters to them is in Keys when they need to be somewhere at a particular time, or when one of the minor magic items they acquire has a time limit. They do, however, get a pocket watch.
    • The clock starts at noon, when all hands are at 1; this is called “All Up,” signals lunch, and is the only known Ketafan clock setting to correspond with any 24-hour clock setting.
    • No calendar, day names, etc. are mentioned at any time, but the inhabitants on both continents refer to “hands” of days or years.
  • In Kyon: Big Damn Hero, Kuyou Suou measures time in terms of number of rotations of a black hole rotating at approximately maximum speed, which is about 1,150 per second.
  • In Plan 7 of 9 from Outer Space a hostile plant alien demands the human authorities hand over twenty gurqs of uranium (a gurq is equivalent to one Earth kilogram) and a hundred geeks of fertilizer (a geek is equivalent to the weight of one sci-fi fan) within one neegath (equivalent to one Earth hour minus 0.0095746338th of a microsecond). There are also neeps, each equivalent to one Hollywood minute: a circumstantially-variable duration of time.
  • Pokémon Reset Bloodlines has this come up with one of the show's longest running mysteries: Ash's age. In fic, Ash himself has no idea how long his journey pre time travel was as per one of the stories ongoing jokes, so he eventually starts to measure the length of time he was traveling in gym battles.
  • Warriors Redux revamps the system of time used in the Warriors series. Cats judge time by the position of the sun and moon. They also have their own names for the seasons. To be more specific:
    Time is marked visually by the position of the sun and moon - half, low, tilt and high are the words by which cats estimate their version of hours. Half is when the sun or moon is peeking over the horizon; Low is about a paw's width from the horizon; Tilt is the range from Half to just before noon; and High (otherwise called noon or midnight) is when the sun or moon is at its highest, marking the middle of the day or night. Using these terms, a cat will not say "it took 4 hours", but "it took from low-moon to tilt".
    Moons and half-moons are both recognized portions of time, but only moons are used commonly. Like with humans, a moon is about a month, chronicling the complete lunar cycle. A half-moon is harder to gauge, since it's usually used in the context of remembering a recent event, but stands at around 10-15 days. The cats may instead describe the shape of the moon during the event being discussed, using closed, open, and the various descriptors inbetween.
    Seasons are a larger chunk of time, and very hazily defined, bleeding into each other depending on the weather. Last year's winter can be much shorter than this year's, for example, if it was a little warmer or took longer to snow. A season being skipped over entirely is an omen of terrible things to come. The feline words for seasons refer to the conditions of the trees, roughly translatable to "leaf-bare" (winter/Shou), "new-leaf" (spring/Aora), "green-leaf" (summer/Hhen), and "leaf-fall") (autumn/Kih). There are a variety of other nicknames referring to things associated with these seasons which go in and out of popularity with the seasons themselves.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Men in Black uses this trope in a grimly comedic way, tossing 'week' in where it really shouldn't go...
    Kay: Arquillian battle rules, kid: first we get an ultimatum, then a warning shot, then we have a galactic standard week to respond.
    Jay: A "galactic standard week?" How the hell long is that?
    Zed: One hour.
  • Coneheads: Seven Remulakian zerls correspond to approximately sixteen 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 Man of Steel, Zod and his followers are sentenced to the Phantom Zone for three hundred "cycles". These are presumably Kryptonian years, but since no matter how much time they measure, Krypton doesn't have three hundred of them left, it quickly become a moot point.

    Literature 
  • Inverted in The Wheel of Time, which uses a ten-day "week". Downplayed since this is mentioned exactly once outside the glossary; most of the viewpoint characters are from rural areas that don't usually keep track of anything more precise than the seasons and don't even know the names of the days. One character who refers to "a week or ten days" is assumed to mean "a week, i.e.: ten days".
  • In Steven Brust's Dragaera novels, a Dragaeran week is 5 days. Humans/Easterners still use seven-day weeks, and even fortnights (14 days), which Vlad (raised in Dragaera) thinks is a really weird period of time to have a name for because it is "...one day shorter than three weeks."
  • Most of L.E. Modesitt Jr.'s novels, even those in entirely different settings, have "eightdays" instead of weeks and use "kays" for distance.
  • Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars stories. Martian civilization used the following time units: 1 Xat = 200 tals, 50 xats = 1 zode, and 10 zodes = 1 Martian day. Mars has a day almost identical to Earth (24 hours 39.6 minutes), so 1 zode = 2 hours 28 minutes, 1 xat = 3 minutes and 1 tal = .9 second.
  • Gor (based a lot on Barsoom) measures 80 Ihn (seconds) to the Ehn, 40 Ehn (minutes) to the Ahn, and 20 Ahn (hours) to the day.
  • Mercedes Lackey's Heralds of Valdemar books call an hour a "candlemark".
    • The whole "candlemark" thing comes from a real-word form of clock from the medieval period, which was simply a candle made in a length which would (theoretically) take X hours to burn down. The candle was striped in hour-long segments, so you could tell by looking at it how long it had been since you lit it. Obviously there was much potential for imprecision in the real world; in Valdemar they've got it down to a bit more of a science.
    • Valdemar's neighboring countries use other units called "[something]marks" or just plain "marks." They're all on the same order of magnitude, but no two of the same length, leading to some in-universe confusion.
  • In the 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 in a complicated schedule. Time is further divided into the shorter 'chimes', which eventually are shown to be about fifteen minutes.
  • The Race in Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series apparently operates on metric time, as their phrase "one tenth of a daytenth" equals out to about fifteen minutes.
  • The giant, moving city on rails in The Inverted World uses "miles" as a measure of time. Though initially confusing, this is eventually explained when it is revealed that the City has to move 1/10 of a mile per day in order to survive; thus, a character might say "a mile ago" to mean "ten days ago."
  • Isaac Asimov:
    • Deliberately averted in Nightfall (1990), co-written with Robert Silverberg; The authors say this is to simplify the narrative, because using alien words might break the reader's Willing Suspension of Disbelief. 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 the 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.
  • Often used in the Star Trek Novel 'Verse.
    • 6 human months equals about 4 Vostigye ronds, and nearly 40 Talaxian niziks. A Romulan Veraku is about 63 Earth minutes, and a Siuren is roughly 50 seconds.
    • The novels have standardized terms for the full range of Vulcan, Romulan and Klingon time measurements, from seconds through to years. They're used quite often if these races are the POV characters in a given scene.
    • The Aluwnans in Genesis Force use the rather uninspired "instants" and "units" in place of minutes and hours.
  • At one point in the Dragonback series, Alison Kayna notices that the Valahguan "Death" weapons the scout fleet gets hit with cut off after three minutes and 47 seconds, which led her (correctly) to the conclusion that the weapons were strictly a loaner and that the enemy alliance wasn't that firm. Draycos mentions that that would fit, since 3 minutes 47 seconds works out to two birs of Valahguan time measurement.
  • A "week" on Discworld is eight days long. This could, potentially, have caused difficulties with the Discworld Diaries line of humorous datebooks, but the quandry was resolved by saving Octeday for amusing anecdotes and character sketches.
    • It is also canonically established that a year (a full revolution of the Disc) is 800 days and has eight seasons. This is never respected after being established, so a linked system of "short years" of 400 days and 4 seasons was retconned in. If you're going forward along the turtle's left side in summer in an odd short year, you'll be going backwards on the right side in an even summer. To keep things simple, each short year has 13 months.
  • In Joan Vinge's The Outcasts Of Heaven Belt, all time units have been replaced by multiples of seconds (megaseconds,gigaseconds), freeing them from dependence on any local rotation or revolution cycles.
  • In the Darkover books, a Darkover day is twenty-eight hours. Why twenty-eight? Presumably (in the author's attempt to retcon this), the original Lost Colony approximated the Earth hour (before they forgot their origin), but adjusted to a new day length.
  • In Journey to the Morning Star, the Etherians measure time in tils, tiltils, soltans, and ladoses. A til is a hair longer than a second. A tiltil is a hundred tils. A soltan is a hundred tiltils. A lados (Etherian day) is eighteen soltans. It's not specified what they call a year, although they also measure orbital cycles, and one full orbit of Etheri Tau around Lado is equal to 422 ladoses.
  • In Wiz Biz series the World measures time in "day-tenths" which is 1/10th between today's sunrise and sunset. Yes, their length varies as the day length changes. Interestingly, the time in Wizard's Keep seems to be in synch with California — "two day-tenths from sunrise" is the same in both places.
  • Erin Hunter:
    • Cats in Warrior Cats 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 Survivor Dogs 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 the Moon-Dog", while smaller units such as a day would be "one Sun-Dog journey".
    • Bears in Seeker Bears 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.
  • Rabbits in Watership Down don't have a clear sense of time. They only have approximations. "Fu Inle" translates to "after moonrise".
  • In Arrivals from the Dark, the Lo'ona Aeo use "eightdays" as their version of weeks, and their human mercenaries have to adapt to that. It's not clear if the length depends on which planet one is on, especially since the Lo'ona Aeo themselves have been a Space People for millennia (although their space habitats generally orbit one of their now-deserted central worlds).
  • In Tailchaser's Song 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 Murderbot Diaries uses "cycles" in place of "days"; Justified since timekeeping needs to be standardized across planets with different rotational periods, Space Stations, and ships in interstellar transit. Discussed when some people caught in a 20-year Leonine Contract realize they don't know what standard of "year" the contract uses and have an Oh, Crap! moment.
  • Diaspora uses the "tau" as the standard unit of time in virtual-reality Polises. Distinct in that the Polises' relative perception of time is determined by the processing power they run on; the tau-to-second ratio has grown hugely over the years, so when some characters temporarily sync with robotic bodies to parlay with humans, they're pained to know that time is passing 800 times faster "back home".
  • In Necessary Evil, a character has to summon help from the alien Eidolons, and asks them to gauge the time by 7000 human heartbeats.
  • The Dispossessed has "decads", which are ten-day weeks.
  • The Three Galaxies from Have Space Suit – Will Travel use radioactive half-lives measured in base-twelve for timekeeping.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Trope Namer Farscape's alien characters commonly use 'microt', 'arn' and 'cycle' in place of 'second', 'hour' and 'year' (roughly). John Crichton (the only Earth character in the series) picks up on it, and often counters with nonsense of his own. They also use "solar days" (a real world NASA term to describe a planet's local rotation) even in situations where there isn't a planet to refer to. Some of that may be handwaved by Crichton having Translator Microbes.
  • Battlestar Galactica (1978) uses "microns" for seconds, "centons" for minutes (or for hours in the series pilot), "centars" for hours, "sectons" for weeks, and "yahrens" for years.
    • "Yahren" is pronounced exactly like the German Jahren, the dative form of the word Jahre meaning "years". In fact, the plural of "yahren" in old BSG was "yahren". So yes, BSG did just rip off German.
    • In real life, "micron" is slang for micrometre, is one-thousandth of a millimetre, but that would mean that when the Cylon raiders were "ninety microns and closing," they were 0.09 mm away. But seriously, folks, the Viper coordinator probably meant the raiders would arrive in 90 seconds on their present course and speed.
    • The show hung a Lampshade on it in the episode Greetings From Earth where other human space colonists used seconds, minutes, and hours while Apollo said "Wait just a centon!" trying to figure it out.
    • Helpfully translated for us by an Earth-analog native in "Experiment In Terra," when Starbuck tells her he'll be back in a "centar":
      Brenda: Whatever that is, I hope it's less than an hour.
  • Battlestar Galactica (2003) averts this, except for some documents visible onscreen in Armistice Station in the miniseries, which use original-series terminology. Spoken dialogue and other writings have "years", "minutes", etc.
  • Doctor Who:
    • Daleks use "rels" to indicate a short period of time, which varies between about one and two seconds from one episode to another.
    • Time Lords in the Expanded Universe measure time in spans and microspans.
  • In Babylon 5, Drazi cycle not Drazi week. Cycle Drazi year. It can be assumed that almost all species have their own time units, but the Babylon station runs on Earth time. Some early episodes referred to on-station time in terms of "cycles" (the writers never quite agreed how long a cycle was; the Drazi example was meant as a joke about that), but this was dropped in favor of standard Earth time units.
  • Red Dwarf: The Kinitawowi are shown to use hanaka as form of time measurement in "Emohawk: Polymorph II". Kryten says a hanaka is exactly the same as a minute, which somehow leads the Cat to calculate that five hanaka is twenty-eight hours.
  • Star Trek:
    • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
      • Beginning with this series, 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.
      • In one episode, the Klingons use "turns" to describe years.
    • Star Trek: Voyager
      • The planet in "Time and Again" used rotations, intervals, and fractions. And Hindu-Arabic numerals.
      • Averted in "Prime Factors" when an alien gives a measurement based on the distance between the sun and her home planet, and Harry Kim mentally converts it to light years.
      • A recently de-assimilated Seven Of Nine once attempts to participate in a conversation regarding children by remarking that "Children assimilated by the Borg are placed in maturation chambers for seven cycles". That goes over about as well as could be expected. The exact length of the "cycles" she mentions is not stated, and considering the nature of the Borg, could be anywhere from seconds to years (though probably closer to the latter).
  • Parodied in the Stargate SG-1 episode "Wormhole X-Treme!" when one of the characters in the Show Within a Show uses 'bleems' as a measurement of time comparable to years. This was quite likely a subtle case of good-humored ribbing via Actor Allusion, since by this point, Ben Browder and Claudia Black, the former lead stars of the Trope Namer Farscape, had joined Stargate SG-1 as regular cast members.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Exalted has a year... that's made up of 15 months and 5 days that are "outside the year", called Calibration. Also, every month is made of exactly 28 days.
  • The Forgotten Realms has the "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.
  • Paranoia supplement Acute Paranoia. Alpha Complex used the phrase "half a cycle" for the period between 1 wake-up call and the next (i.e. 1 day). A "cycle" was therefore 2 days.
  • In the old Dungeons & Dragons setting "Hollow World," where the setting lacked a day-night cycle, the basic unit of time was the "march."
  • The Imperial Dating System of Warhammer 40,000 records dates in the format of check number, year fraction, year, millennium (e.g. 0123456.M41). The check number refers to how far removed the recorded event is from Terra (0 being on Terra, 9 being in the Warp and therefore chronologically unreliable). The year fraction refers to when in the year the event occurred in a system divided into one thousand units; each increment corresponds to roughly eight hours and forty-five minutes. The year and millennium are straightforward. The example works out to "This event happened on Terra in the 123rd increment of the 456th year of the 41st millennium."

    Video Games 
  • Bug Fables has "moons", which equate to months, according to Word of God.
  • The X-Universe series has the "sezura", "mizura", "tezura", "wozura", "mazura" and "jazura", developed by the local Lizard Folk Teladi. None of them directly correspond to Earth time units. 1 sezura = 1.7 seconds, 1 mizura = 96 sezuras (2 min, 43 sec), and continuing into ever more irregular measurements. X2: The Threat dropped the alternate measurements; the games still use the alternate names, but they correspond directly with standard time measurements, like one mizura being one minute. X3: Terran Conflict switches to standard Earth time units, coincidentally as Earth is reconnected to the rest of the universe.
  • The Slylandro in Star Control II have "rotation," "Drahnasa," and "Drahn" which are something like their equivalent of days, years, and millennia (not particularly similar in duration to ours though). It would be tricky to decode these except that pretty much everything interesting that's happened on a galactic scale happens in one of three time periods (Quite Recently, A Long Time Ago and A Really, Really Long Time Ago) so luckily it's not too hard to figure out what they're on about.
    • To be more precise, one "rotation" is one "day" of their planet, 1 Drahn is equal to 4 million rotations and one Drahn is divided into two thousand Drahnasa. Some code examination reveals that the rotation of the Slylandro homeplanet is 14.2 earth hours which tells us that one Drahnasa is equal to 1180 earth days (a little over 3 years) and one Drahn is 2370000 earth days (roughly 6500 years).
  • The people of the Metroid universe use "cycles" for a span of time somewhere between a few months and about a year. Space Pirate logs often talk about projects being developed over the course of a few cycles, for example figuring out how to infuse their troops with Phazon in Metroid Prime, especially as it took multiple failed attempts. U'mos in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is mentioned to be several centicycles old (technically it should be centocycles, but that's a different trope entirely). Might it be some based on other planet's year? By the time of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, however, references to cycles have been replaced by references to mundane years and months.
  • In Iji, The Tasen and Komato use "cycles", "pulsecycles", and "starturns", although how they correspond to human units of time is unknown. Starturns would presumably be a Komato year, but since we don't know how long it takes their planet to orbit, it doesn't help much.
    • According to Word of God, a Starturn equals a year (how long it takes Origin (i.e. Earth) to make a full orbit around its star), a Longturn equals a month (but it's unknown how many make up a Starturn), a Turn a day (how long it takes Origin to make one rotation around its axis), a Cycle an hour (unknown how many make up a Turn), a Shortcycle a minute (unknown how many make up a Cycle), and a pulsecycle a second (whatever the Komato pulse was when they came up with it).
  • Final Fantasy XIV measures hours as "bells" and months as "moons". The calendar used in Eorzea is analogous with the Gregorian calendar, being comprised of twelve months with approximately thirty days each (give or take an extra day in some months), with individual months being labeled as alternating "Astral Moons" and "Umbral Moons", and days within those months as "Suns". To name a couple of examples: the Eorzean equivalent of January 16 would be called the "16th Sun of the 1st Astral Moon", while April 7 would be the "7th Sun of the Second Umbral Moon".
  • Phantasy Star Online has an interesting example that also serves as Gameplay and Story Integration in the form of the Swatch corporation's "Internet Time", a universal measurement of time that applied across the entire world (and the game's servers) which, in theory, eliminates the concept of time zones by applying the current time in Internet Time everywhere, in the service of facilitating better communications among the game's international playerbase. There are 1000 ".beats" per day in Internet Time, which comes out to one minute and 26.4 seconds of real time per .beat. Based on that, a "second" in Internet time is approximately a hundredth of a .beat, a "minute" coming to seven tenths of a .beat, and an "hour", 41.666 .beats. When applied to a clock, noon would be consider @500 .beats, and midnight, @000 .beats.
  • The Homeworld series is a bit inconsistent about this, using a fictitious unit of measurement called a "klom" interchangeably with "kilometre" on at least one occasion without making it clear from context whether the former is slang for the latter or an exception to the Translation Convention. Conflicting reports on the canonical size of in-game units doesn't help clear this up.
  • In The Feeble Files, the game's characters frequently use "cycle" and "click" when referring to various amounts of time. It's never made clear what exactly is the amount of time these two are supposed to represent.
  • The Ratchet & Clank series typically uses "cubits"note  as a unit of length, combined with SI prefixes. For instance, an unexpectedly important part in Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction is a "3 3/4 centicubit hexagonal washer."
  • A careful look at the clocks in Stray shows that they have sixteen hours instead of the usual twelve. Which makes sense for a civilization of robots as 16 = 24 or 10000 in binary.

    Webcomics 
  • In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!, the dragons and Nemesites measure time in "zarps." Since "half a zarp" seems to equal at least a short night's sleep, we can guess a full zarp is probably something between 12 and 16 hours. An author's comment when they first appear compares them to astroseconds, centons, and rels.
  • The trolls in Homestuck call years "sweeps", although the Alternian year is equal to around 2.16 Earth years.
  • In Escape from Terra most Belters use a decimalized calendar and time-keeping system designed by the Mars colonists. Particularly "centimes" (about 14.8 minutes) and "decadays" (10 Martian days).
  • In Last Res0rt the galaxy has apparently adopted Swatch Internet Time
  • Characters in Awful Hospital use 'layers'. A 'layer' is stated to be about the amount of time it takes to read a page of the average webcomic.note  Other, more poorly-defined units of 'time' include 'spiralings' and 'cubeoids' (which probably equate to individual panels and entire story arcs).
  • The Greys in General Protection Fault measure time in "gandans". These are first mentioned when Pi says he and Planck will be "tortured for a thousand gandans" for failing to abduct Fooker. When they reappear less than three years later, he admits that a thousand gandans is about fifteen seconds. Longer periods of time are measured in mega-gandans, giga-gandans, and so on.

    Western Animation 
  • Transformers:
    • In Beast Wars: Transformers, 'cycles' are used for minute-like timespans. There are also "nano-kliks" (roughly a second), "decacycles," "megacycles," and "stellar cycles," which varied Depending on the Writer (megacycles at one point going from roughly an hour to, from context, roughly a year).
    • Transformers: Animated uses this so much you really wish they'd just break down and convert the damn units. "Wait a cycle!" "I haven't done this in deca-cycles!" "I have bided my time for eighty mega-cycles..."
    • The original The Transformers series had the infamous "astroseconds," "astrominutes," "astrolitres," "a Cybertronic mili-inch," etc. The first episode mentioned a unit of time called a "quartex," but it was never mentioned again.
  • In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Donatello calculates a ratio of 1 Triceraton trigon to 10 minutes.
  • In Reboot, the characters said things like "In a nano" or "Gimme a nano." Nano as nanosecond. The characters living in a computer, this actually makes sense.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic uses "moons" as a "longer-than-a-week-but-shorter-than-a-year" measurement of time, and never specifies exactly how long a "moon" is. The obvious guess, that it's simply a pony-ism for "month" due to how its used and the association with lunar cycles, immediately falls apart when recalling that in this setting, the moon is controlled manually, and every other unit of time is unchanged. The show's director eventually clarified that "it's a unit of time with no human equivalent," which fits its tendency to be used when the writers don't want to worry too much about the timeline. To give a few examples:
    • The Apple Family Reunion is held "every 100 moons".
    • The Crystal Mirror to the human world in the Equestria Girls spinoff opens once "every thirty moons" for three days. Twilight later uses an invention to open the mirror manually so they can go through whenever they want.
    • In the Grand Finale, Twilight establishes the Council of Friendship between herself and her friends when she moves back to Canterlot to become the new ruler of Equestria, which meets up "once a moon".
  • In Voltron: Legendary Defender, Alteans measure time in "ticks", which a prolonged gag has the team eventually deduce are slightly longer than seconds. The second season expands on this: A decafeeb is somewhere between a years and a decade, a quintant is roughly a day, a varga seems to be about an hour, and dobashes are more or less a minute. After a while, the Paladins manage to pick up on it.

    Real Life 
  • Historically, attempts to replace seven-day weeks with something else have failed. This has been attributed to, of all things, bearded men preferring to trim their facial hair on the same day each week: wait longer than seven days and it grows enough to get tangled; don't wait as long, and they're grooming themselves before there's much need to do so.
    • The Metric calendar failed in part because pretty much everyone (this was revolution-era France) still had to use the old calendar to track the Sundays. A calendar change also causes problems for holidays like Easter, the date of which is based on the interface between a seven-day week and the lunar cycle and moves every year. note 
  • When NASA scientists are talking in terms of subjective time on another planet, they use "sols" to cover a single rotationnote  of the planet, to keep the Earth measurements lined up with the clock. The Martian sol is 2.7% longer than an Earth day, so the difference is about 40 minutes a day. This can really add up over the months and years. Since all on-site equipment is solar powered, all scheduling is done according to the length of sols, and some team members have Martian time watches. Some particularly dedicated researchers end up having rather peculiar sleep schedules by Earth standards.
  • In 1969 the Swiss company Helbros brought out a "lunar watch" for the use of astronauts, which divides the lunation into 30 "lunes" of 24 "lunours". (Centilunours and decilunours for shorter periods.)
  • Various forms of decimal divisions of the day.
  • The Other Wiki lists several unusual time units, such as the 1.2096 second "microfortnight".
    • An in-joke in the Arch Linux community are kiloseconds.
    • Combining the above, note that a "millifortnight" comes out to 1,209.6 seconds, i.e., very close to 20 minutes, or a third of an hour.
  • The stereotype of Native Americans using the phrase "many moons ago", or similar, comes from some of them using a lunar calendar rather than a solar or lunisolar one ("moon" meaning "actual lunar month" as opposed to the abstraction called a "month" on a lunisolar calendar). Other cultures primarily speak in terms of seasons; Navajos, for example, are religiously forbidden to discuss certain religious subjects or do certain tasks (like weaving) except in winter, "the Season when Thunder Sleeps". Some cultures may have eight or six seasons instead of four, depending on the local climate or what the calendar is designed around (hunter-gatherers, for instance, may find the breeding seasons of deer more important than the planting seasons for grains).
  • There's a "bilisecond" (sic) in Microsoft .Net SQL API. Documentation describes it as 1 billionth of a second. Actually, it's 1/1000th of a millisecond, i.e. a microsecond. There were suggestions that whoever designed the API had no idea of metric prefixes and assumed "milli-" to be 1 millionth and "billi-" 1 billionth. Or maybe named the unit after Bill Gates. And misspelled it.
  • A "sargon" is sometimes mockingly used as a unit of time equal to 5 minutes. This comes from an infamous incident where someone made a video criticizing of You Tube personality Sargon Of Akkad for using Logical Fallacies, relying on bad reasearch, and the like as well as implying he was immature. Sargon himself responded by basically saying "Oh please, can't you summarize this in 5 minutes? I don't have the patience to sit through half an hour of this!"

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