上午
shàng wǔ
In real, traceable use. Part of the curated seed collection; community review is coming.
The part of the day before noon: the morning, up to about twelve o'clock. 上午九点 is 9 a.m. 早上 is the early morning around getting up, while 上午 covers the whole morning until noon. Its partner is 下午, the afternoon: 上 is the half before noon (午), 下 the half after.
Cả buổi sáng, tính cho đến giữa trưa. 上午九点 là chín giờ sáng. 早上 là sáng sớm lúc mới dậy, còn 上午 là cả buổi sáng cho đến trưa. Nó đi đôi với 下午 (buổi chiều): 上 là nửa ngày trước giờ ngọ (午), 下 là nửa sau.
NounRegister: neutral
Examples
Editorial example (illustrative, not a corpus attestation) — awaiting a native-speaker check
Sources & notes
Hán-Việt bridge batch 064 (2026-11-14). Headword, Traditional form and pinyin checked against CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0) source ↗ · Hán-Việt reading: Unihan kVietnamese source ↗ · No Vietnamese entry is linked as its twin; the Hán-Việt reading is given character by character. Definition, literal gloss and example sentence are original; the example has not had a native-speaker check yet.
Common questions
What does “上午” mean?
The part of the day before noon: the morning, up to about twelve o'clock. 上午九点 is 9 a.m. 早上 is the early morning around getting up, while 上午 covers the whole morning until noon. Its partner is 下午, the afternoon: 上 is the half before noon (午), 下 the half after. Literally: before noon
Is “上午” formal or informal?
上午 is generally neutral.