What exactly is a subdial? - The Watch Doctor

In this week’s blog post, we are going to take another deep dive into some watch terms. This week we will figure out what exactly is a subdial.

A subdial is the mini dial that sits on the watch face or dial. They are known as auxiliary dials and serve a few different functions. Those include tracking lapsed seconds, minutes and hours, moon phases or a second time zone across specialty watches like chronographs, calendars and GMT watches.

The subdials are meant to improve the overall readability of the measured elapsed time by breaking down the seconds, minutes, and hours separately.

By adding up the figures you read in the subdial, you can calculate how much time as passed since you started the chronograph.

Take a look at these different kind of subdials.