I am new to the world of smartwatches. I’m not an Apple person, so no Apple Watch for me. I love my Pixel phone, but was wary of the first Pixel Watch and waited for version 2, because you should never get v1 of any technology, right?
But now I have one. My smartwatch shows me the time, the steps I’ve walked today[1], my heartbeat, a timer, and whether I have any notifications:
Smartwatches being wrist computers and all, they’re very configurable. Using an app on your phone, you can edit what the watch face shows. When I configured the options, I was interested to see that the app calls these options complications:
My take at the time was that this was an interesting name and I didn’t think any more about it. Not, that is, till I was reading the book Timekeepers by Simon Garfield. In a chapter about Swiss watchmaking, I learned (belatedly, whoops) that complications is not some term that smartwatch developers came up with. As Garfield notes, in the world of watchmaking, “The word ‘complications’ is used for anything in a watch superfluous to telling the time, such as a feature showing the phase of a moon”. Ah. Even if your watch doesn’t tell you phases of the moon, you surely are familiar with “complications” like a date display, a stopwatch/chronograph (“time writer”), and an alarm.
Speaking of alarms, it seems that this was where we got the word watch: a clock that could awaken you (wecche in medieval English). Watch had a variety of timepiece-related meanings over the centuries, until it settled into referring to portable clocks, and then finally to small clocks that were driven by a spring. Perhaps you, too, will be surprised to learn that wristwatch (both the device and the word) dates from as recently as the 1890s.
As for smartwatch, that particular word dates to the mid-1990s when wrist computers were new. This is a fairly obvious extension of the word smart to refer to machines, a usage that goes back to the early days of computers (1940s) and picked up pace in the 1970s or so. From 1972 (via the OED): “The term ‘smart terminal’ is used here to identify an interactive terminal in which part of the processing is accomplished by a small computer or processor contained within the terminal itself.”
A nice name for watchmaking is horology, which is from the Greek hora, meaning “hour” + the general-purpose -ology suffix. In medieval times, horology was used to describe time-telling devices generally, but by the 1800s had narrowed to refer to the work of crafting timepieces.
In addition to addressing the challenges of accuracy and portability,[2] horologists also wanted to add useful functionality and, not incidentally, showcase their skill. Hence complications.
The word complication is the noun form of complicate, which arrived in English in the 1600s. It seems to have been a conscious borrowing from the Latin complicatus, which is com (“with”) + plicare (“fold”). The latter part is related to many other “fold”-y words, like duplicate, multiply, pliant, and reply, among others.
A tantalizing question that I can’t find the answer to at the moment is at what point watchmakers started using the word complication with the specific meaning of an extra clock function. Maybe a reader has insight into this?
A rule of thumb for mechanical watches is that the more complications, the higher the price. Or vice versa. By convention, a grand complication (or grande complication, with that continental -e) is a timepiece that has three or more complications. (In contrast, a watch with just the basics is simple.) At the extreme is the Vacheron Constantin Reference 57260 watch, which has 57 complications. Price? Not disclosed.
So that’s some new-to-me terminology about mechanical watches, and a peek into the mind-boggling complexity and craft that they require. My Pixel Watch is of course a computer, so not only is it easily more accurate than any mechanical watch could be, but the number of complications it could have is limited only by what a programmer can dream up.[3]
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[1] My step count is based on FitBit technology, I believe, which seems to have a very generous take on how many steps I’ve actually walked.
[2] The British government offered an enormous prize to the person who could develop a clock that stayed accurate at sea over a long period, as documented in (among other places) Dava Sobel’s book Longitude.
[3] I should point out that one site maybe just a tiny bit sniffily makes a careful distinction between a complication and a function, specifically noting that complications are mechanical and those quartz watches just have functions. By that measure, as I interpret this distinction, smartwatch developers are not using the word complications correctly.
Thanks for this! I’d had no idea about “complications.” I was amused to see that you configured (or complicated?) your watch to read “Caturday.”
That “caturday” text is a my reminder to post! As it happens, it’s the next thing on my calendar. (It made me laugh, too.)