Analog Clock

This page draws a working analog clock face in the browser and keeps it running against the time your own device reports. The dial is vector artwork rather than a picture, so the hands rotate smoothly and every line stays sharp whether the clock sits in a small laptop window or fills a projector screen. A digital line under the face repeats the same moment in 12-hour form with an AM or PM marker, which makes the page useful both as a plain clock and as a reading aid.

What the dial shows

The face carries sixty tick marks, one for every minute. Twelve of those ticks, the ones on hour positions, are drawn heavier and darker so the hours and quarters stand out from across a room. Numerals appear only at 12, 3, 6, and 9. That is a common choice on wall clocks: four cardinal numbers give the eye enough reference to fill in the rest by spacing, and omitting the other eight keeps the dial uncluttered at small sizes.

Three hands turn from a shared center. The hour hand is short and thick, the minute hand is longer and thinner, and the second hand is a thin red line reaching nearly to the ticks. A small dark cap covers the middle where all three cross. Underneath the face, the digital readout prints hours, minutes, seconds, and AM or PM in a fixed-width style so the digits do not shift sideways as they change.

How far each hand moves

A full circle is 360 degrees, and each hand divides that circle on a different schedule. The second hand completes one turn per minute, which works out to six degrees every second, or exactly one tick mark per step. The minute hand completes one turn per hour, so it also covers six degrees, but per minute rather than per second. The hour hand completes one turn every twelve hours: thirty degrees per hour, which is the gap between two adjacent numerals, and half a degree for every minute that passes.

That last figure explains the detail most beginners miss. The hour hand does not rest on a number and then jump to the next one. It drifts the whole time, so its position encodes the minutes as well as the hour. At half past three it sits exactly midway between the 3 and the 4. At ten minutes to four it has crept close enough to the 4 that a quick glance reads four o'clock, when the true time is still three-something. This clock reproduces that continuous motion instead of snapping the hour hand to whole hours, because a face that snapped would teach a habit that fails on every real clock.

Sweep seconds and tick seconds

Two buttons control how the second hand behaves. Sweep seconds redraws the hand on every animation frame the browser produces, commonly around sixty frames per second, using the fractional part of the current second as well as the whole number. The hand appears to glide without ever stopping. Tick seconds updates only when the whole second changes, so the hand holds still on a mark and then steps to the next one.

The distinction copies a real difference between movements. A quartz clock pulses its second hand once per second, one mark per step, because the circuit divides the crystal's oscillation down to a one-second impulse. A mechanical movement beats far faster: a common modern rate is 28,800 vibrations per hour, or eight beats per second, and at that speed the steps are too small and quick to separate, so the hand appears to sweep. Switching modes here changes only how the hand is drawn between whole seconds; the time is identical either way.

Reading the face step by step

The usual teaching order starts with the hour hand alone. Ignore the other two, ask which pair of numerals the short hand sits between, and take the lower of the two, even when the hand looks closer to the higher number. Then bring the minute hand back and count ticks around from the 12, using the printed numerals as anchors: the 3 is fifteen minutes, the 6 is thirty, the 9 is forty-five.

The step that trips learners up is that a single numeral means two different things depending on which hand points at it. A hand on the 4 means four o'clock when it is the short one and twenty minutes past when it is the long one. Spoken forms such as quarter past, half past, and quarter to map directly onto the quarters of the dial, which is why the four printed numerals are the ones worth learning first. The digital readout underneath acts as an immediate answer key, so a learner can guess from the hands and check the guess without asking anyone. Analog faces remain standard in classrooms, exam halls, and public buildings, and reading them is still part of elementary math curricula in 2026.

Why the digital line carries AM and PM

A 12-hour dial puts the hands in exactly the same position twice a day. Nine in the morning and nine at night are geometrically identical on the face, so the face alone is an incomplete statement of the time. Some analog clocks solve this with a small 24-hour subdial or a day-and-night aperture; this one does not, and the digital line supplies the missing half of the day instead. If you want a display that never repeats itself, a 24-hour readout such as the one on the online clock or the flip clock removes the ambiguity by design.

Fullscreen mode for a wall or classroom

The Fullscreen button expands the face until it fills the window and switches the dial to a dark background with light hands and light numerals. The second hand stays red but shifts to a lighter shade so it still separates from the other two. The inverted scheme exists for rooms rather than desks: on a projector or a large wall panel a bright white circle throws a lot of light into a dimmed space, while a dark dial keeps the room comfortable and leaves the hands clearly visible from the back row.

Nothing else changes. The same clock keeps running, the sweep or tick choice is preserved, and the digital line stays below the face, so a class watching the final minutes of an activity can follow the second hand from any seat. Leaving fullscreen restores the light dial. If a large set of digits would serve the room better than hands, the fullscreen clock is built for that instead.

Where the time comes from

The clock reads your device's own clock and its configured time zone. There is no time zone selector, so the face always shows local time for whatever machine you are looking at. Accuracy depends entirely on the operating system: if the computer or phone is a few minutes fast, the hands are fast by the same amount, and the fix belongs in the system date and time settings rather than here.

Most current devices synchronize against a network time server and hold to well under a second, and daylight saving transitions are applied by the system, so the face follows a spring-forward or fall-back change on its own. Nothing is stored and no preference is remembered between visits, so reloading simply starts the same face again in sweep mode.

Related tools

For a digital readout of the same local time, use the online clock, or the fullscreen clock for a room display. The flip clock shows split-flap digits, and the text clock spells the time out in words. To compare several cities at once, see the world clock. Every related clock and timer is listed on the time tools hub.