What the clock says in a place — the least portable way to write a time down.
Local time is the civil time in force at a place at a moment: standard time or summer time, whichever applies that day.
It is how people speak and the worst way to record anything. A local time without a zone cannot be converted, and a local time WITH a zone but stored as an offset cannot be converted correctly once the rules change. Both failures are silent.
The rule for systems is to store an instant, in UTC or with a full zone identifier, and render local time at the point of display. The rule for documents is to name the place: '17:00 in Frankfurt' survives, '17:00' does not.
Local time is whatever the clock reads today. Standard time is the baseline it returns to when summer time ends.
An offset lets you compute local time at one instant. It is the result of a rule, not a substitute for knowing which rule applies.
See also standard time · utc offset · time zone · iana time zone
We hold this as rendered per place from the presentation zone. See what we hold.