Now, you do not have to spend much time around watches before you figure out pretty quickly that a chronometer is not a chronograph. The latter, of course, is basically a combination of a watch and a stopwatch; the former, at least nowadays, is a watch which — assuming it comes from an ISO-standards compliant country, which Switzerland is — has been certified by an independent examination board and found to meet certain minimum standards.
A history of the word ‘chronometer’, the use of escapements and 18th-century satire
Humpty Dumpty famously says, in Alice in Wonderland, that words are nothing more than pieces in a game, where you can change the rules any time you want. “When I use a word,” he says, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” To which Alice replies, tactfully if sceptically, “The question is... whether you can make words mean so many different things.” In all of watchmaking, there is probably no word that this applies more to than “chronometer”, which first burst on the scene in 1714 — or so many people think — and has been shape-shifting ever since.
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