Horology (pronounced haw-rol-uh-jee)
(1) The science of time.
(2) The art and science of making timepieces or
measuring time.
(3) In Orthodox Christianity, the office-book of
the Greek Church for the canonical hours.
1852: The construct was the Ancient Greek hōro (combining form of hṓra (hour;
part of the day; any period of time)) + -logy.
The suffix -ology was formed from -o- (as an interconsonantal vowel) + -logy.
The origin in English of the -logy suffix lies with loanwords from the
Ancient Greek, usually via Latin and French, where the suffix (-λογία) is an
integral part of the word loaned (eg astrology from astrologia) since the sixteenth century. French picked up -logie from the Latin -logia,
from the Ancient Greek -λογία (-logía). Within Greek, the suffix is an -ία (-ía) abstract from λόγος (lógos) (account, explanation, narrative),
and that a verbal noun from λέγω (légō)
(I say, speak, converse, tell a story).
In English the suffix became extraordinarily productive, used notably to
form names of sciences or disciplines of study, analogous to the names
traditionally borrowed from the Latin (eg astrology from astrologia; geology from geologia)
and by the late eighteenth century, the practice (despite the disapproval of
the pedants) extended to terms with no connection to Greek or Latin such as
those building on French or German bases (eg insectology (1766) after the
French insectologie; terminology
(1801) after the German Terminologie). Within a few decades of the intrusion of
modern languages, combinations emerged using English terms (eg undergroundology
(1820); hatology (1837)). In this
evolution, the development may be though similar to the latter-day
proliferation of “-isms” (fascism; feminism et al). Descents of the Greek hōro came into use in many languages including the Hebrew הוֹרָה (hóra), the Romanian horă and the Turkish while from the
Modern Greek χορό (choró) (accusative of χορός (khorós) (dance)) came Hora,
a circle dance popular in the Balkans and Israel. In Late Latin, the derived
form was horologium.
Between the early sixteen and nineteenth
centuries the meaning was restricted to describing clocks or their dials by at
least 1820 reference books were noting “term horology is at present more
particularly confined to the principles upon which the art of making clocks and
watches is established”. The earlier
sense in English reflected the inheritance from the Latin horologium (instrument for telling the hour (and in Medieval Latin “a
clock”), from the Ancient Greek hōrologion
(instrument for telling the hour (ie the sundial; water-clock et al), from hōrologos (telling the hour). Horological was used as early as 1590s, horologiography
(the art or study of watches and timepieces) by the 1630s and the first horologists
(the practitioners of horologiography) appeared to have emerged (or at least
first advertised themselves) in 1795.
The noun horologe (a clock or
sundial) is long obsolete. Horology,
horologiography & horologist are nouns, horological is an adjective and
horologically is an adverb; the noun plural is horologists.
Greenwich Mean Time
Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the mean solar time
at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London.
It’s daily reset point is now midnight but, in the past, it has been set
from different times including at noon and for this reason, if GMT is of
substantive importance in some historic document, it’s sometimes necessary to
determine which method of calculation applied at the time. Because of Earth's uneven angular velocity in
its elliptical orbit and its axial tilt, noon (12:00:00) GMT is rarely the
exact moment the Sun crosses the Greenwich meridian and reaches its highest
point in the sky. The event may occur up
to 16 minutes before or after noon GMT, a discrepancy included in the calculation
of time: noon GMT is thus the annual average (ie "mean") moment of
this event, which accounts for the "mean" in GMT. In the English-speaking world, GMT is often
used as a synonym for Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and while this is close
enough for many practical purposes, in the narrow technical sense GMT is now a
time zone rather than time’s absolute reference. For navigation, it is considered equivalent
to UT1 (the modern form of mean solar time at 0° longitude); but this meaning
can differ from UTC by up to 0.9 seconds so GMT should no longer be used for purposes
demanding a high degree of precision.
The
Shepherd gate clock is installed at the gates of the Royal Observatory in
Greenwich and was the first clock ever to display GMT to the public. It is a “slave clock”, hardwired to the Shepherd
“master clock” which was first commissioned at the observatory in 1852. One obviously unusual aspect of the gate
clock is that it has 24 hours on its face rather than the typical 12, thus at 12
noon the hour hand is points straight down rather than up. In digital timepieces are common and the user
often has the choice of a 12 or 24 hour format by in analogue devices they’re
historically rare although Ford Australia did include one as a novelty in the first
series of its locally produced LTD & Landau (1973-1976). The clock remained a one-off.
Between 1852-1893, the Shepherd master clock was the baseline of the UK’s
system of time, its time was sent over telegraph wires to London and many other
cities including some in Ireland and from 1866, the signal was also relayed to
a clock in Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, along the new
transatlantic submarine cable. One of
history’s most significant clocks, it originally indicated astronomical time,
in which the counting of the 24 hours of each day starts at noon though this
was later changed to starts at midnight. It continues to show GMT and is never adjusted
for daylight saving time.
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