Posted on Januar 20 2026
A chronograph is a watch with a stopwatch built in. The two buttons beside the crown and the small dials on the face all belong to that stopwatch, and once you know which does what, it’s simple to use.
The buttons
- Top button (near 2 o’clock): starts and stops the timing.
- Bottom button (near 4 o’clock): resets everything to zero once the timing is stopped.
Some models swap or add functions, and the manual is the final word, but this layout is by far the most common.
The hands and subdials
When you start the chronograph, the large central seconds hand begins to sweep. That’s the chronograph seconds, not the watch’s own seconds. The subdials count the rest: one adds up the minutes, and on many models another adds up the hours. A third small dial often shows the watch’s running seconds, which keep going whether or not you’re timing anything.
To read a time, add up the subdials and the central hand. How finely a chronograph measures, and for how long, depends on the movement; the manual lists both.
The tachymeter
Some chronographs have a scale around the bezel or the edge of the dial marked Tachymeter. It turns a time into a speed. Start the chronograph as you pass one kilometre marker and stop it at the next: the number the seconds hand points to on the scale is your speed in kilometres per hour.
If a hand won’t go back to zero
After a knock or a battery change, a chronograph hand can stop slightly off zero when you reset it. It’s usually an adjustment rather than a fault, and the manual explains how to realign it.