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Is this the most natural way to put it:

I work in a big company. At 12 o'clock I have an hour break.

Or should we better say:

I work in a big company. At 12 o'clock I have an hour's break.

Or even

I work in a big company. At 12 o'clock I have a one-hour break.

I would go for the last version, being unsure in how widely the first two are used, under the "leave well enough alone" principle; but still I'm curious.

P.S. My question is different from this one because I'd also want to know whether "an hour break" is okay. I was proofreading this text, chanced upon this expression, decided to inquire whether it was okay, but in the end added some alternative formulations.

I'd like to know which is more widely used and whether there are differences in meaning.

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All three phrasings are acceptable and mean the same thing. However, it's likely that one particular version - possibly different from the three you mention - is the most common way to say it in your region. That doesn't make it somehow "more correct", but putting it slightly differently than the locals do might give your speech a bit of a foreign sounding flavor.

An hour break is what I most commonly hear, probably because it's the shortest to say and I'm generally conversing in an informal register, but you will be understood just fine using any of those three statements.

One very minor thing I will note is that it's o'clock, not o"clock. The single quote is used to indicate ellipted characters or words in contractions, and o'clock is a contraction of of the clock.

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I think "one-hour break" would be the most common way to say this.

"An hour break" is also acceptable.

People sometimes say "an hour-long break". Though you might argue that that just adds an extra word for no good reason.

It's not "an hour's break" as the break does not belong to the hour: a possessive is not appropriate. If you had a five minute break every hour, you might say "this hour's break", that is, the break for this hour.

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    "An hour's break" is perfectly correct usage, because it is a break of one hour. This usage isn't as common as it used to be, but you do still see it: Google Ngrams search result
    – stangdon
    Commented Dec 8, 2015 at 15:25
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    What @stangdon said. It's already misleading to single out one of OP's alternatives as "better" than any others. It's even worse to mistakenly single out an hour's break as "wrong" (particularly if, as I more than suspect, that's actually the most common form in natural speech).
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Dec 8, 2015 at 17:53
  • @FumbleFingers +1 I'd generally say "I'm going to have an hours break" or "I'm going to have an hour off"
    – Dan
    Commented Dec 8, 2015 at 18:53
  • @Dan: I'd also generally say that, but if you're going to write it you really should include the apostrophe (Jay is mistaken in supposing the Saxon genitive implies possession, ownership in such usages). But when I just checked Google Books for have an hour / an hour's / a one hour break the numbers are 626/206/431, so apparently we're in a (slight) minority. On the other hand, switching to the more informal get an hour/.../... break gives 156/39/8, so in the context of casual speech we at least move up from last position to second place.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Dec 8, 2015 at 21:12
  • @FumbleFingers Not my intent to say that a genitive can only mean possession in the sense of "these are MY shoes because I bought and paid for them". As I vaguely recall us discussing elsewhere, "possessive" is a very broad concept: there's a huge difference between "my shoes", "my husband", "my country", "my favorite color", etc. ("Red is MY favorite color! You'll have to pick a different one because I already claimed red.") My intent (mine!) though, was to say that I don't see any sense in which "hour's break" makes sense as a possessive.
    – Jay
    Commented Dec 8, 2015 at 21:26

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