Horse 1190 - Round And Round

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/column-8/column-8-20110516-1epu1.html
"Does anyone know what the direction of travel around a circle was called before clock faces were invented?" asks Nigel Hancock, of Castle Hill. "The reason I ask this is I suspect it will have to be resurrected shortly, as Gen Y's younger siblings (Gen Z?) have no idea what clockwise and anti-clockwise mean in the digital age."


The word for clockwise before clocks were invented perhaps not surprisingly was "Sunwise". That little word also gives you a hint as to why clocks go in that direction in the first place.

If you are living in the Northern Hemisphere as the majority of conquering civilisations were, then if you were to erect a sundial, you'd notice that the sun which rises in the East sweeps a trail through the Southern portion of the skies before settling in the West. - East. South. West.
Like wise the shadow which is always going to be in the opposite direction of the light source (the sun) describes a path from the West, points to the North before trailling off to the East. - West. North. East.

In both cases, the light source and the shadows move in the same direction of travel around the central point of the compass in a sunwise direction.
If you were going to build a machine that mechanically pointed to the sun on its journey across the sky so that you could tell time by it, then quite naturally it would mimic the sun and shadows and also travel in a sunwise direction.
The word clock itself probably derives from the Celtic world "clocca" which means a "bell", being the messenger from the mechanical govenor of time.

If you wanted a word to describe something that went the other way to the sun, it would be obvious to call it something that meant "the other way".
The word for the other way in English before the invention of the clock is the word "Widdershins", which comes to us via Lowland Scots and Low German. The Low German word "widersinnig" means "against sense" and are good cognates.

I wanted to confirm this and so I took a trip down to a park near where I work, and presumed that because I live in the Southern Hemisphere, that the sundial would go in the opposite direction to the Northern Hemisphere because the sun travels East, North, west, and that the numbers would be arranged in a Widdershins direction. Lo and behold, they are.

Of course the obvious counter argument to the Column 8 problem is simply to give the younger generations normal watches. Digital Watches have existed since 1972 and they haven't displaced analogue watches at all.