Tocades

A word clock that tells the time in Catalan using the traditional bell-tower system (sistema de campanar tradicional), where hours are divided into quarters and each quarter belongs to the next hour.

Live at tocades.poblador.cat.

The language

Unlike most clocks that just read off digits, the sistema de campanar thinks about time as a continuous journey between quarter-hour references:

15:00  →  Són les tres
15:03  →  Són les tres tocades
15:05  →  Són les tres ben tocades
15:07  →  És mig quart de quatre
15:10  →  És mig quart passat de quatre
15:14  →  És vora un quart de quatre
15:15  →  És un quart de quatre
15:22  →  És un quart i mig de quatre
15:30  →  Són dos quarts de quatre
15:37  →  Són dos quarts i mig de quatre
15:45  →  Són tres quarts de quatre
15:52  →  Són tres quarts i mig de quatre
15:59  →  Són vora les quatre
16:00  →  Són les quatre

Every minute of the day gets its own phrase, built from seven modifiers applied to the current quarter reference:

Offset	Form
+0, +1	[ref]
+2, +3	[ref] tocada(es)/tocat(s)
+4, +5	[ref] ben tocada(es)/tocat(s)
+6	vora [mig ref]
+7, +8	[mig ref]
+9..+11	[mig ref] passat(s)
+12,+13	[mig ref] ben passat(s)
+14	vora [next ref]

Verb (és/són) and modifier gender/number always agree with the reference.

The grid

A 15×15 letter matrix that fits every phrase from 00:00 to 23:59. Unlit letters remain faintly visible; filler letters are random but never match their orthogonal neighbors. The compound words D'UNA and D'ONZE are single contiguous blocks so the elision reads naturally.

Running locally

Static site, no build step:

python3 -m http.server 8765
# open http://localhost:8765/

Credit

By David Poblador i Garcia. Built with Claude.

Language reference: Sistema tradicional o de campanar (Diputació de Barcelona).