Future Soldier Training Practice Test

In the 24-hour clock, you read the hour part first and then the minutes. The digits 14 and 30 translate to “fourteen” and “thirty.” Put together, it’s spoken as “fourteen-thirty,” with the hyphen often used in writing to show the two parts belong to the same time. This is the standard way to express 14:30 in military or schedule contexts, and it avoids any confusion with a simple number reading.

Reading it as a plain number would be “one thousand four hundred thirty,” which describes a quantity, not a time. Saying “fourteen thirty” without a hyphen is also understandable, but the hyphenated form is the conventional way to denote time in 24-hour notation.