9 Prepositions of Time At On In English Grammar Rules | Preposiciones de tiempo en inglés

AT ON IN - Prepositions of Time

English Grammar Rules

AT

We use AT with specific times (hour / minutes):

Midnight (and midday) is a specific hour which is why we use AT.

12am = midnight
12pm = midday / noon

We use AT for a holiday period of two or more days:



ON

We use ON for specific days and dates:

Remember that for dates, we use ordinal numbers.

E.g. the First of September (not the one of September)


IN

We use IN for specific months, years, seasons, centuries and lengths of time.

Compare:

The New Zealand National day is in February.
(I don't mention the day - only the month)

The New Zealand National day is on February 6th.
(I mention the day - the order is not important)


Prepositions of Time At On In

The Weekend

Sometimes you will hear AT the weekend and sometimes ON the weekend.

They are both correct. ON the weekend is used in United States.

See our video about: AT the weekend vs. ON the weekend


We don't use Prepositions

Remember! We do not use at, on, in or the with the following expressions:

Prepositions with Parts of the Day

The prepositions AT, ON, IN with parts of the day - English grammar rules

Prepositions of Time Chart

I have updated the old green AT ON IN chart (it was one of the first charts I did as I was learning how to create them) to the newer version below which I created for our video.

AT ON IN - Prepositions of Time in English

Next activity

If you would like to play an interactive game to practice these Prepositions of Time, visit here: Prepositions of Time (At, On, In) Game.

NEW: Download our free Prepositions of Time (At, On, In) Worksheet (in PDF).
You can check the answers to this worksheet here: Prepositions of Time (At, On, In) Answers.

If you would like a list of other Prepositions, visit here: Prepositions List

You may also want to learn about Prepositions of Place

Try these 101 exercises to practice AT ON IN in English. Can you get them all correct?

English Resources

Prepositions of Time PowerPoint Presentation Prepositions of Time - English Task Cards

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