definite articles - Why is it "time of day" but "hour of the day"?


Well, the title is a little misleading, because both "time of day" and "time of the day" are possible and can have the same meaning.[here] But "time of day" is more commonly used (when we're not mentioning a particular day, of course):


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So you're more likely to hear:



We love to eat around this time of day.



But after we substitute "hour" for "time", the article is almost always in there:


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So the previous example would become:



We love to eat around this hour of the day.



I imagine that native speakers of English would agree that it sounds a little off (or at least less natural) to say: ?We love to eat around this hour of day.


These 2-grams† bellow will show that the tendency to omit the definite article after time of exists in other similar phrases too:



† or bigrams, or n-grams, if you will



To complicate things further, take a look at this 2-gram, which tells you that any time of the day is a little more common than any time of day; i.e., adding any kinda swaps the results around!
I guess this is because you're more likely to talk about a nonspecific time of a specific day, than to talk about any time of any day, for there is not much to say about it; hence the definite article before day.




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