A watch is a small portable timepiece or clock that displays the time and sometimes the day, date, month and year. In the 18th and 19th Century, these often took the form of pocket watches, which today are seldom carried or worn. In modern usage, watch is usually a contraction of wristwatch, a designation for the most popular style of timekeeping device worn on the wrist.
Because most watches lack a striking mechanism, such as a bell or gong to announce the passage of time, they are properly designated as timepieces, rather than clocks.
[…] Wristwatches are often treated as jewelry or as collectible works of art rather than as timepieces. This has created several different markets for wristwatches, ranging from very inexpensive but accurate watches intended for no other purpose than telling the correct time, to extremely expensive watches that serve mainly as personal adornment or as examples of high achievement in miniaturization and precision mechanical engineering, without any pretense at being accurate for telling the time. Still another market is that of “geek watches”—watches that not only tell the time, but incorporate computers, satellite navigation, complications of various orders, and many other features that may be quite removed from the basic concept of timekeeping. […]