Prahar to Hours (prahar to h)
1 prahar equals 3 hours exactly.
How to convert prahar to hours
To convert prahar to hours, multiply the number of prahar by 3. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply hours by 0.3333333333 (rounded).
hours = prahar × 3
Example: 10 prahar = 30 hours.
Months and years are not constant. This site uses the average Gregorian year of 365.2425 days, so one 'year' converts to 365.2425 days, not 365; use 'common year' for exactly 365 days.
About these units
Prahar (prahar)
Three hours: an eighth of a day. Traditional South Asian watches of the day and night.
Hindi speakers still say dopahar for afternoon, literally two prahars, and Bengali has the related dui-pohor. The Sanskrit prahara divides the day and night into eight watches, four starting at sunrise and four at sunset. In the standard model each lasts about three hours, though traditionally the length followed the real sunrise and sunset, so day watches were longer in summer and night watches longer in winter.
A nineteenth-century note cited by Wikipedia puts northern India's day prahars at roughly 3.5 hours near the summer solstice and 2.5 hours in winter. The figure used here is the fixed three-hour watch. Four prahars correspond to fifteen muhurtas, but the two systems agree only at sunrise and sunset, since a muhurta is a fixed 48 minutes.
Prahars matter in Indian classical music, where each raga is prescribed for a particular watch. The link between raga and time is already in Narada's Sangita Makaranda, dated between the 7th and 11th centuries, and Wikipedia argues the idea is older than Bhatkhande, who died in 1936.
1 prahar = 10,800 seconds (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Prahara; Wikipedia: Hindu units of time
Hour (h)
60 minutes or 3,600 seconds, one twenty-fourth of a mean solar day.
Egyptian astronomers gave us the twelve. Coffin lids from about 2150 BC show the night divided into exactly 12 intervals, tied to the rising of star groups called decans, and the day was later split into 12 hours with sundials. These were seasonal hours, a twelfth of the daylight, so a summer hour was longer than a winter one. The word itself comes from Greek hora, originally any span of time, through Latin and Old French into English in the 13th century.
Equal hours of 1/24 of a day were probably first proposed by Hipparchus, and mechanical clocks made them the practical choice, since a clock showing seasonal hours had to be readjusted every morning and evening. Today the hour is exactly 3,600 seconds and is a non-SI unit accepted for use with the SI. Civil time still bends it a little: UTC hours have lasted 3,601 seconds 27 times since 1972 to keep clocks within 0.9 seconds of the Earth's rotation. In practice we use it for working shifts, travel times and electricity bills measured in kilowatt-hours.
1 hour = 3,600 seconds (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Hour; BIPM: SI Brochure, 9th edition
Related conversions
- Hours to prahar (reverse)
- Prahar to seconds
- Prahar to minutes
- Prahar to days
- Prahar to weeks
- Prahar to months
- Prahar to years
- Seconds to hours
- Minutes to hours
- Days to hours
- Weeks to hours
- Months to hours
- Years to hours
- Milliseconds to hours
- Microseconds to hours
- Nanoseconds to hours
- Decades to hours
- Centuries to hours
- Millennia to hours
See all time units.