A Broken Clock Is Always Right Twice a Day

Imagine a clock frozen at 3:15. Useless, right? Not quite. That motionless timepiece will correctly display the time exactly twice every 24 hours—at 3:15 AM and 3:15 PM. It's a simple truth that spawned one of English's most enduring proverbs about reliability, accuracy, and the occasional triumph of sheer dumb luck.

The phrase "even a broken clock is right twice a day" first appeared in The Spectator magazine in 1711, penned by essayist Joseph Addison. Originally discussing the fleeting nature of fashion trends rather than human reliability, the saying took on new life as a metaphor: even the most consistently wrong person, source, or method will occasionally stumble upon correctness, if only by accident.

The Math Checks Out

A traditional analog clock has 12 hours on its face. Over a 24-hour period, each specific time occurs twice—once during the AM cycle and once during PM. If your clock stops at 9:42, you'll find yourself vindicated at 9:42 in the morning and again that evening. That's 730 moments of accuracy per year from a completely non-functional device.

Digital clocks complicate this elegance. A digital display frozen at 12:00 might only be correct once daily (at noon) or twice (noon and midnight), depending on whether it uses 12-hour or 24-hour format. A 24-hour digital clock stuck at 13:00 gets just one moment of glory per day. The classic saying really works best with old-school analog timepieces.

When Wrong Is Accidentally Right

The beauty of this idiom lies in its application to human behavior. We all know someone whose predictions are reliably incorrect, whose advice consistently backfires, or whose opinions defy both logic and evidence. Yet statistics alone suggest they'll eventually say something accurate, even if entirely by chance.

This creates a philosophical puzzle: Does accidental correctness count as being right? If someone predicts rain every single day and happens to be correct during an actual storm, have they demonstrated meteorological insight or just persistence? The broken clock doesn't understand time—it merely exists in a state that occasionally aligns with reality.

The Flip Side

Author Lewis Carroll explored the inverse concept in his writings around 1850. He noted that a clock running one minute slow would only show the correct time once every two years, while a stopped clock is right twice daily. His counterintuitive conclusion: a completely broken clock is more useful than one that's slightly wrong.

This reveals the saying's darker wisdom. Consistent mediocrity can be worse than total failure. A source that's always wrong becomes predictable—you simply invert their conclusions. But something that's mostly wrong, with occasional accuracy, is genuinely dangerous because you never know when to trust it.

So the next time someone with a terrible track record happens to make a valid point, you can acknowledge their momentary accuracy while remembering: even a broken clock is right twice a day. It doesn't mean the clock is fixed—it just means time kept moving forward until reality briefly matched the error.