Analog Clock

An analog clock tells time using hands sweeping around a fixed 12-hour face. The short hour hand makes one full trip every twelve hours, the longer minute hand completes a circuit every sixty minutes, and the thin second hand ticks through all sixty positions once a minute. Reading one at a glance is really about position, not numbers — the hour hand’s angle relative to the 12 tells you roughly what hour it is, and the minute hand fills in the precision.

How to read the hands

Start with the short hand for the hour, then the long hand for the minutes. “Half past” is the minute hand straight down at the 6; “quarter past” is straight right at the 3; “quarter to” is straight left at the 9. The second hand is just there to show the clock is live — its constant motion is the quickest visual confirmation that time is actually passing.

Why there’s no AM or PM

Because the face only spans twelve hours, a purely analog clock can’t distinguish 3:00 in the morning from 3:00 in the afternoon on its own. That context usually comes from daylight, routine, or a small AM/PM indicator elsewhere. A 24-hour digital display doesn’t have this ambiguity, since it counts straight through the day.

How this clock works

The clock on this page isn’t a static illustration. It’s driven by your device’s own system clock and redraws every second, so the second hand keeps moving in real time. It also reads your device’s time zone setting automatically, so the hands reflect your local time without any manual adjustment — open this page from anywhere in the world and the hands will already be in the right position for wherever you are. If your device’s clock or time zone is set incorrectly, the display will inherit that error, since there’s no independent time source behind it.

Where a clock like this is handy

• A large, glanceable time display on a spare screen or old tablet
• Teaching kids to read analog time alongside a digital reference
• A quiet desk clock that doesn’t need an app or an account
• Checking that a device’s clock is set right by comparing it to another

For the numeric version, see the digital clock. To check the date rather than the time, use today’s date, and for where the day sits in the year, what week of the year it is.

The angle between the hands

Clock-angle questions are a classic in math class. The minute hand moves 360° in 60 minutes, 6° per minute. The hour hand moves 30° per hour, and also creeps 0.5° per minute as the hour goes by. So at H hours and M minutes the angle between them is

If the result is more than 180°, subtract it from 360° to get the smaller angle.

Notice 3:15 is not 0°: by quarter past, the hour hand has moved 7.5° past the 3.

When do the hands overlap?

The minute hand gains 5.5° per minute on the hour hand, so it catches up every 360 ÷ 5.5 = 65 5/11 minutes. That gives 11 overlaps in 12 hours, not 12, because the 11:00 to 1:00 stretch has only one (at 12:00):

The hands form a right angle 22 times every 12 hours, or 44 times a day.