What could be the possible noun of the time between the minimum and maximum?

Fellow Anglophones,

I'm developing a Timer App and I have trouble thinking about what could be the appropriate noun for this time.

Right now, I'm using the expression Average Time. However, I don't think it's the proper one neither in English nor in my native tongue Spanish. Do you have any suggestions for a more professional word? Thanks in advance for your worthy knowledge.

Additional information:

The behavior is like a traffic light:

• Green is the minimum, you can continue.
• Yellow is a warning that you can continue, but your time is almost done.
• Red is the limit and you must finish.

Examples:

• 1 to 2 minutes.
  1. Green means 1:00 minute.
  2. Yellow means 1:30 minutes.
  3. Red means 2:00 minutes.
• 5 to 7 minutes.
  1. Green means 5:00 minutes.
  2. Yellow means 6:00 minutes.
  3. Red means 7:00 minutes.
• 10 to 15 minutes.
  1. Green means 10:00 minutes.
  2. Yellow means 13:00 minutes.
  3. Red means 15:00 minutes.
• 20 to 30 minutes.
  1. Green means 20:00 minutes.
  2. Yellow means 27:00 minutes.
  3. Red means 30:00 minutes.

If there is any Toastmaster out here or any of you have ever visited our meetings, you could have an extra idea.

Sample text for the single-word request:

• Set the minimum time to 20 minutes, the maximum time to 30 minutes, and ____ time to 27 minutes. The warning will appear when the ____ time has elapsed.

Solution 1:

It sounds to me that you want to set the minimum and maximum times for a speech, and then have the yellow light turn on at the midpoint between the minimum and the maximum.

In order to use your app effectively, the users need a term for this time (in order to refer to it in conversation with others), and a definition (to explain what it means). The term will be used frequently. The definition hopefully less so.

You don’t need to use a mathematical term. You could just as easily use a functional term, such as warning time, and then explain the calculation in your definition. This would allow you to have a default calculation, which could be correctly described as the average, the midpoint, the half-way point, or something similar. It would also allow the organizer (I forget the official Toastmasters term) to have longer or shorter “yellow times” to suit the group’s taste.

I can understand your reluctance to use average time, since the term average is usually applied to a set of measurements that have been completed, whereas your application (as I understand it here) is more about indicating the stage reached in a process that is still continuing. Average is technically correct in describing the calculation, but semantically wrong in relating the calculation to its real-world use.

My suggestion for the term is caution time, since the yellow light on a traffic signal is typically referred to as a caution.

Solution 2:

Colloquially, and how signal colours are actually used, yellow (regardless of its calculation), is a warning signal—so the equivalent here would be warning time.

(At least in North America. If you are in Britain, then perhaps the other answer of caution time would be more appropriate. I'm not sure, as I've never heard that phrase myself. But I do know that in North America police officers hand out warnings, and in the UK they hand out cautions.)