Home > Terms > English, UK (UE) > Decimal clock
Decimal clock
In France in 1793, the Revolutionary government ordered decimalisation of the systems of measurement, including time. The new time, which divided the days into ten hours, the hours into 100 minutes and showed ten hours only on the dials of clocks, was paralleled by a new system of ten Revolutionary months, each named after a natural attribute of the season (September becoming Fructidor, the fruitful month), and divided into three 'decades', each of ten days. Twelve months of 30 days each gave a year of only 360 days; the five extra ones were to be used for national festivals and Leap-Year Day for a Festival of the Revolution. Clocks showing decimal time are rare and most clockmakers seem to have played safe by showing duodecimal time on the same or a subsidiary dial. The system lapsed with the rise of Napoleon and the establishment of the Empire.
- Part of Speech: noun
- Synonym(s):
- Blossary:
- Industry/Domain: Chronometry
- Category: Clock
- Company:
- Product:
- Acronym-Abbreviation:
Other Languages:
Member comments
Terms in the News
Featured Terms
Chekhov's gun
A rule that states that any object introduced in a work of entertainment must serve a purpose - if it has no purpose, it should be removed as it only ...
Contributor
Featured blossaries
Browers Terms By Category
- American culture(1308)
- Popular culture(211)
- General culture(150)
- People(80)
Culture(1749) Terms
- Lingerie(48)
- Underwear(32)
- Skirts & dresses(30)
- Coats & jackets(25)
- Trousers & shorts(22)
- Shirts(17)
Apparel(222) Terms
- Poker(470)
- Chess(315)
- Bingo(205)
- Consoles(165)
- Computer games(126)
- Gaming accessories(9)
Games(1301) Terms
- Wireless networking(199)
- Modems(93)
- Firewall & VPN(91)
- Networking storage(39)
- Routers(3)
- Network switches(2)
Network hardware(428) Terms
- Mapping science(4042)
- Soil science(1654)
- Physical oceanography(1561)
- Geology(1407)
- Seismology(488)
- Remote sensing(446)