Clockwise

[Blue_Blistering_Barnacle]

@Blue_Blistering_Barnacle

I’ve seen the expressions “sunwise” and “widdershins”, but my cite is a Fritz Leiber fantasy novel.

I can find sunwise in online dictionaries, but I haven’t seen anything to say how old the term is.

Apparently “sunwise” may not have had common use or even be very old. This cite (searching Google books) says 1775, but it may be a typo, as their cite says 1875.

What did we say before "clockwise"?

Etymonline says that the word clockwise arose in 1870, much later than clocks. Before that, the word sunwise was used, but it appears to have been fairly rare.

There were words (e.g. deiseil and tuathail) for these concepts in the Celtic languages, since in Celtic cultures the directions clockwise and counterclockwise are quite important, but English seems not to have felt a great need for these concepts, and used sunwise on the rare occasions the concepts came up. All the pre-1850 Google books hits I can find for sunwise or sun-wise are describing Celtic, Hindu, ancient Roman, or American Indian customs. The earliest reference I can find on Google books for sunwise is 1775.

From The origin and history of Irish names of places, by Patrick Weston Joyce (1875):
Deisiol [desshul] is another derivative from deis, and signifies towards the right hand, or southwards. The Celtic people were—and are still—accustomed to turn sunwise, i.e. from left to right, in the performance of various rites, some of them religious, some merely superstitious, and the word deisiol was used to designate this way of turning.

If sunwise had been a common term at the time, or if there had been another commonly-understood word meaning clockwise, the author would not have felt the need to explain it by “i.e. from left to right”.

[ftg]

@gotpasswords

Until someone figured out how to transform a sundial into a mechanism that could hang on a wall, there probably wasn’t much need to describe rotation on a vertical plane.

Vertical sundials on the outside of English churches used to be a quite common thing. Googling on “sundial on an English church wall” gave me a lot of hits, including many images.

For a period during the Middle Ages, these could have been the most common sundials an average English peon saw in some localities.

[Ignotus]

@ftg

Vertical sundials on the outside of English churches used to be a quite common thing. Googling on “sundial on an English church wall” gave me a lot of hits, including many images.

For a period during the Middle Ages, these could have been the most common sundials an average English peon saw in some localities.

But the shadow moves counter-clockwise on those!

[ZoeRPM]

@AlinAZ

How did people describe circular motion around a central point before clocks were invented?

Clockwise (the way people are ‘supposed’ to turn) was deshels and anti-clockwise was widdershins, with variations on these words, such as withershins. The word deshels comes from the Gaelic for the south or right, the assumption being that the most important cardinal point is East (face east and the south is to your right). Widdershins comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for ‘against’ (Middle High German for ‘against’ is wieder; *sin *means direction. People who habitually turned to the left were at one time thought of as witches. Nowadays, most turns single in dancing are to the right unless otherwise described, for that reason.

[MrSquishy]

@Mangetout

There’s no particular reason to suppose that all clocks ever will be digital, barring some apocalyptic event that destroys all existing analogue clocks, and the memory of them (but somehow leaves us with the ability to continue making digital ones). People still like analogue clocks and will quite likely always continue to like them.

Even of it does happen, we’ll probably retain the terms, just like we retained ‘dialling’ in the context of telephony.

A friend of mine still refers to recording something on his PVR as “taping” it. I’m the same age he is but it sounds weird to me now.