Listening just now to a radio report of the counter-clockwise spinning Irene hurricane called to mind a night some years ago when I was lost in the Surrey darkness, trying to find the house of an English friend. My friend called me and said that I had made a mistake by turning left at the ring road, where I should have instead traveled “anti-clockwise”.
I was surprised at the term, which I had never heard before. Its meaning is transparent on its face, but what threw me off was that my friend didn’t use my mother’s word “widdershins”, which I knew came from her UK ancestors. To them, widdershins meant particularly walking around the outside of a church with the wall always to one’s left, which could bring the devil’s curse of bad luck.
I later learned that the word was apparently specific to the Scottish regions of my mother’s family, and never took hold in England. If you want to give “widdershins” a whirl so to speak, conversations about Irene today give you your chance.
The one frequent appearance of the word is in Terry Pratchett’s novels, which are set on a disc-shaped world instead of a spherical one. North, South, East and West are replaced by Hubward, Rimward, Turnwise and Widdershins. The latter two are indeed much nicer adn universal words than clockwise and anti/counter-clockwise
What, no love for ‘deiseal’?
I’m more familiar with “counter-clockwise.’
I don’t get it. Does “anti-clockwise” or “counter-clockwise” mean that the clock goes from displaying “9:24” to “9:23”?
Hans - Anticlockwise is British, counterclockwise American. http://www.englishonline.org.cn/en/vocabulary-grammar/johnny-grammar/grammar-notes/anticlockwise-counter-clockwise
Likewise, “counterclockwise” is the more familiar formation than “anticlockwise”. I can only remember “deiseal” and “widdershins” by converting them to clockwise and counter-.
According to the Wikipedia entry on “widdershins”, it is cognate with the Germanic “against [the correct] sense”, which adds a level of meaning to Philip K. Dick’s Counterclock World.
The shortest French translation is dans le sens contraire à celui des aiguilles d’une montre. However did French witches manage before there were clocks?
I first recall coming accross this word in Tim POwers’ “Last Call”. It seems to be cropping up quite a bit lately in the fiction I’m reading. Hmmm.
Hadn’t actually seen “widdershins” in that form until now, but I know I’ve seen it as “withershins,” which I think is the more usual literary form. At least more usual among British journalists, or was so, because I’d swear I’d seen it in the Guardian and I haven’t subscribed for quite a while now. OED’s entry is under “withershins” and earliest references are 16C. Apparently not specifically counter-clockwise but more like not the expected or usual way.
This is actually really funny: the last few days I have been wracking my memory trying to remember the title of a juvenile-SF book I read when I was a juvenile, some time ago. I could remember the plot quite well, and that it was British, and an early effort by someone who later became well-known, but not the author’s name, the title or any internal personal- or place-names. And then I chance across this post and boom! it comes to me: the book was set on the planet Widdershins. A quick Googling gives “The Dark Side Of The Sun,” 1976, Terry Pratchett. Thank you!
As an Australian, I’ve grown up using “anti-clockwise”. I am aware of ‘counter-clockwise”, but I always thought of it as a longer and clumsier way of saying “anti-clockwise” so I never liked using it.
I’ve long known of “widdershins”, but until today I had no idea what it actually meant. Thank you 🙂