[eadmund]

A sport watch is not a dress watch, not a dive watch and not a field watch. It’s typically water-resistant, but not hugely water-resistant (swimming, rather than diving). It typically has a metal bracelet or a tropical rubber strap.

A dress watch is thin, almost always with polished rather than brushed surfaces, rarely with a date complication, rarely with lume, sometimes without a second hand, with a leather strap. It’s meant to slide underneath a shirt cuff and be both elegant & discrete. It is probably not water-resistant. It may not have a minute track.

A dive watch is meant for scuba diving. It will have one-way bezel marked with minutes for tracking dive time. It will be heavily lumed. It will typically have a metal bracelet.

A field watch is based off of a WWI officer’s watch. It should be reasonably water-resistant (weirdly, many are not!). It will always have three hands, and must be hacking (means that the second hand will stop when you set the time, so that it can be set to the exact second). It probably has 13–24 in an inner circle. It definitely has a minute track.

A Garmin or Apple Watch is … not really a watch, but is a wearable computer.

[nradov]

Note that hardly anyone has actually used those "dive" watches for diving in decades. A wealthy, fashion-conscious diver might wear a dive watch while traveling to the dive site, but for actual diving they'll take it off (don't want it lost or scratched!) and bring a cheaper modern digital dive computer (which might come in wristwatch format for certain models, thus further confusing the terminology). In diving circles, if you mention "dive watch" then most people will assume you're talking about a Shearwater or Garmin rather than some Swiss toy.

[eadmund]

> Note that hardly anyone has actually used those "dive" watches for diving in decades.

Yeah, the line about them is that they are ‘desk divers’!

I have the idea that plenty of folks do still use them for diving, but of course I could be wrong — it’s not a community I am much around.