WHAT IS LIGNES SIZE? HOW DO YOU MEASURE IT?

If you’ve been in the Time Connection Community for some time, you’ve seen the word lignes here and there. What does it all mean? What is a lig-nez?!

Lignes is the French word for lines (and pronounced the same way), a unit of measurement for watch movements. Although most watch movements will have the diameters listed in millimeter (mm), you may also see linges listed – especially when dealing with raw movements.

HOW TO MEASURE LIGNES

There are calipers and rulers that are set up for measuring lignes such as this one. If you don’t have a tool, you can convert mm to lignes the old-fashioned way:

1 Ligne = 2.25583mm

And conversely, 1 mm = 0.4433 ligne.

REPRESENTING LIGNES

Time Connection II Inc. posts as much information about each movement as possible – including the diameter in lignes and millimeters. When you see three apostrophes (”’) after the number, it’s not a typo. That’s the linges measurement.

Note that many font types and autocorrections can cause the ”’ to display incorrectly. Frustratingly, at the time of this post, the font type on Time Connection causes it to look like a quotation next to an apostrophe.

LIGNES TO MM TO INCH CONVERSION CHART