We also have more rotating pieces of machinery where their direction is important, than people once did.Īnd so, right and left are still commonly used as such today. But overall, it is more common for rotating objects to rotate on an axis closer to their middle. It's ironically clocks themselves that give our main exception, since a clock's hands are rotating on a point close to one end, it's more reasonable that we would perceive a hand near the 6 as moving to the left, one near the 3 as moving down, and so on. If we view a rotating object along its axis, and bias our perspective to favour the top (which we tend to do naturally), we will say it is moving to the right. In order to ourselves turn around something clockwise, we turn to our right. This doesn't actually come up all that often. In some specific contexts, these can seem abiguous, but only when actually trying to consider the turning without a bias to either part of the clockwise- or counterclockwise-turning object. Most often, right, with left being the most common term for the opposite. 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, 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. ![]() The Celtic people were-and are still-accustomed to turn sunwise, i.e. The earliest reference I can find on Google books for sunwise is 1775.įrom The origin and history of Irish names of places,ĭeisiol is another derivative from deis, and signifies towards the right hand, or southwards. 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. 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. Before that, the word sunwise was used, but it appears to have been fairly rare. ![]() Etymonline says that the word clockwise arose in 1870, much later than clocks.
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