Ship's Watches to Minutes (watch to min)

1 ship's watch equals 240 minutes exactly.

1 ship's watch = 240 minutes

How to convert ship's watches to minutes

To convert ship's watches to minutes, multiply the number of ship's watches by 240. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply minutes by 0.004166666667 (rounded).

minutes = ship's watches × 240

Example: 10 ship's watches = 2,400 minutes.

Months and years are not constant. This site uses the average Gregorian year of 365.2425 days, so one 'year' converts to 365.2425 days, not 365; use 'common year' for exactly 365 days.

About these units

Ship's Watch (watch)

NauticalTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

Four hours, the standard duty period at sea. The 'dog watches' of the evening are split into two hours each.

Naval and merchant crews divide the day into watches so that the ship is never left unattended. A normal watch lasts four hours, and its length is the basis for the figure used here, 14,400 seconds. The traditional scheme described by Wikipedia had five four-hour watches and two two-hour dog watches, named the first, middle, morning, forenoon and afternoon watches, with the afternoon watch ending at 1600.

Splitting the 1600 to 2000 period into a first and second dog watch gives an odd number of watches per day, so each crew member's schedule shifts from day to day, and it also lets everyone eat an evening meal. Time on board is marked with the ship's bell, struck every half hour so that eight bells ends a four-hour watch. Merchant ships typically keep six four-hour watches instead, which makes the pattern consistent.

1 ship's watch = 14,400 seconds (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Watchkeeping; Wikipedia: Ship's bell

Minute (min)

Metric (SI)Current unit

60 seconds. Defined as one sixtieth of an hour.

Minute means small, not short. It comes from the Latin pars minuta prima, the first small part, produced when sixty-based division was applied to the hour. Al-Biruni is credited with dividing the hour into minutes, seconds, thirds and fourths around the year 1000, and Roger Bacon used the same scheme in 1267. For everyday life the minute needed hardware: Jost Bürgi is said to have made the first clock with a minute hand, for Tycho Brahe in 1577, and watches got minute hands only after Thomas Tompion's hairspring of 1675 made them accurate enough.

A minute is 60 seconds, exactly 1/60 of an hour, and the BIPM's SI Brochure is the reference for its symbol, min. Civil timekeeping can bend the rule: because of leap seconds, a UTC minute occasionally holds 61 seconds. A negative leap second would produce a 59-second minute, but that has never happened in more than 40 years. People use the minute for cooking, lectures and phone calls, and the same name serves for the arcminute, which is a sixtieth of a degree.

1 minute = 60 seconds (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Minute; BIPM: SI Brochure, 9th edition; NIST: the second and the SI redefinition

Related conversions

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