Crossword clues for watchmaker
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Watchmaker \Watch"mak`er\, n. One whose occupation is to make and repair watches.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
n. A person who repairs (and originally made) watches.
WordNet
n. someone who makes or repairs watches [syn: horologist, horologer]
Wikipedia
A watchmaker is an artisan who makes and repairs watches. Since a majority of watches are now factory made, most modern watchmakers only repair watches. However, originally they were master craftsmen who built watches, including all their parts, by hand. Modern watchmakers, when required to repair older watches, for which replacement parts may not be available, must have fabrication skills, and can typically manufacture replacements for many of the parts found in a watch. The term clockmaker refers to an equivalent occupation specializing in clocks.
Most practising professional watchmakers service current or recent production watches. They seldom fabricate replacement parts. Instead they obtain and fit factory spare parts applicable to the watch brand being serviced. The majority of modern watchmakers, particularly in Switzerland and Europe, work directly for the Watchmaking Industry, and may have completed a formal watchmaking degree at a technical school. They also receive in-house 'brand' training at the factory or service center where they are employed. However, some factory service centers have an approach that allows them to use 'non-watchmakers' (called "opérateurs") who perform only one aspect of the repair process. These highly skilled workers do not have a watchmaking degree or certificate, but are specifically trained 'in-house' as technicians to service a small number of components of the watch in a true 'assembly-line' fashion, (e.g., one type of worker will dismantle the watch movement from the case, another will polish the case and bracelet, another will install the dial and hands, etc.). If genuine watchmakers are employed in such environments, they are usually employed to service the watch movement.
Due to factory/genuine spare parts restrictions, an increasing minority of watchmakers in the USA are 'independent,' meaning that they choose not to work directly for industry or at a factory service center. One major Swiss watch brand (Rolex) now pre-qualifies independent watchmakers before they provide them with spare parts. This qualification may include, but is not limited to, holding a modern training certificate from one of several reputable schools; having a workshop environment that meets Rolex's standards for cleanliness; using modern equipment; and being a member of the American Watchmakers-Clockmakers Institute. The Omega brand has the same approach. However, the vast majority of modern, Swiss brands do not sell parts to independent watchmakers, irrespective of the watchmaker's expertise, training or credentials. This industry policy is thought to allow the Swiss manufacturers to maintain tighter quality control of the after-sales service for its watch brands, produce high margins on after sales services (2-4 times what an independent watchmaker would ask), and to lower second-hand watchmaking parts on the used and fake market.
Usage examples of "watchmaker".
Then, affecting an air of sadness, she told me that I must give her back the watch because the count had forgotten to pay the watchmaker for it.
Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you-even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.
Then I was apprenticed to an old watchmaker, a friend of my father, who taught me the trade which has served me ever since.
Kalmar and Miss Dupont swiftly took care of a succession of other patients, raising the tolerance level of frustration in a watchmaker, replating the acne-pitted skin of a sensitive youth, restoring a finger lost in a machine-shop accident, and building up good-natured aggression in an ore miner whose productivity had slumped.
These crystalline low-temperature, quasi-natural, and endlessly self-transformed entities had appeared as an infinitely intricate jeweled garden or huge congeries of minute machinery, a masterpiece of the blind watchmaker operating with nothing more than a faint wash of solar and stellar energy differentials and the self-organizing properties of extremophile nanobacteria.
Nowadays its hundred or so blocks were the bright and lively haunt of alcoholics, agnostics, artists, atheists, beggars, cutthroats, deserters, drug dealers, evangelists, footpads, gentry, heathens, informers, jays, knife grinders, lesbians, libertines, mollyboys, musicians, navvies, ostlers, physicians, queers, recruiters, reformers, sailors, socialists, trulls, users, vagabonds, watchmakers, xenophiles, and yuppies.
In Derendorf Matern makes room on the running board for a bilious watchmaker, who might also be a professor, by upending his barracks bag.
There was no cosmic fry cook, there was no watchmaker, there was no designer.
On the way we passed the avenue's empty shops, where haberdashers and tobacconists, watchmakers and smiths, joiners and cobblers and ostlers plied their trades long before our grandparents were born.
One afternoon as the watchmaker sat pensively at his window, thinking about the neighbor's funeral he had attended that morning, he saw Meyn the musician, who lived on the fifth floor of the same building, carry a half-filled potato sack, which was dripping and seemed wet at the bottom, out into the court and plunge it into one of the garbage cans.
There was once a watchmaker who sat pensively by his window, looking on as Meyn the musician stuffed a half-filled sack in the garbage can -- and quickly left the court.
They moved in the sack, set the lid of the garbage can in motion, and confronted Laubschad the watchmaker, who still sat pensively at the window, with the question: what can there be in the sack that Meyn the musician threw in the garbage can?
To assist his father in his entomological studies, he even contrived, with the aid of the descriptions given in the books borrowed from his cousin the watchmaker, to make for him a microscope, from which he proceeded to make a reflecting telescope, which proved a very good instrument.
The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The Extended Phenotype, and others.
Blaine let the Watchmakers get loose on his ship, but Christ, it was impossible to get Moties into Lenin!