Anachronism
Quick answer: An anachronism is a detail placed in the wrong historical time, from Shakespeare's striking clock onward. How to catch accidental ones and use deliberate ones well.
There is a clock striking in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, some fourteen centuries before mechanical clocks existed. An anachronism is a detail placed in the wrong time: an object, word, custom, attitude or technology that does not belong to the period in which the story is set. In other words, it is history's continuity error, and readers of historical fiction hunt it with real enthusiasm.
The term matters wherever fiction leaves the present: historical novels, period short stories, and any tale reaching even twenty years back, since the recent past is the easiest to get wrong. As a craft concern it lives mostly in research and revision, but it has a second life as a deliberate device, because a knowingly planted anachronism can be witty, satirical or thematic.
The term at work: from Caesar's clock to a pair of trainers
Shakespeare's clock is the classroom example because it is so clean: in act two, Brutus and Cassius hear a clock strike three in ancient Rome, a city of sundials and water clocks. It is almost certainly carelessness rather than art, and it demonstrates the accidental kind, the writer defaulting to the furniture of their own age. Every era does this; nineteenth-century painters gave biblical scenes Dutch interiors, and modern novelists give medieval characters twenty-first-century therapy-speak.
The deliberate kind is a different animal. Sofia Coppola's film Marie Antoinette slips a pair of modern trainers into a shot of eighteenth-century shoes, a wink that frames the queen as a bored teenager of any century. The musical Hamilton casts America's founders as hip-hop performers, an anachronism of style that is the entire point of the work. In prose, writers like George Saunders have set historical fiction humming with deliberately modern idiom. Planted openly and consistently, the wrong-time detail becomes commentary.
Why accidental anachronisms hurt
Historical fiction runs on a fragile contract: the reader agrees to believe, and the writer agrees not to break the spell. One wristwatch in 1690 and the contract is void, not because the fact matters but because the reader now doubts everything else, dialogue, politics, feeling. Trust, once punctured, does not reinflate.
The subtler damage comes from anachronisms of mind rather than object. A Victorian heroine who talks like a modern podcast guest about her boundaries is as wrong as the wristwatch, but harder to spot, because attitudes do not appear in reference books with dates attached. Language is the third front: words carry birthdates, and an 1810 character cannot describe anything as okay, a word first recorded in 1839.
How to keep your period clean, or break it on purpose
Check nouns first, since objects are the easiest to verify: lucifer matches, zips, aspirin and paper bags all have datable arrivals. Check idioms in a historical dictionary; etymology entries give first recorded uses. For attitudes, read primary sources from the period, letters and diaries above all, until the era's default assumptions stop surprising you. Then accept that perfect purity is impossible and aim for the reader's belief rather than the archivist's approval.
If you anachronise deliberately, do it early, boldly and consistently, so the reader files it as a rule of the work rather than a mistake. The trap is the halfway house: one joke anachronism in an otherwise strict period story reads as an error, because nothing taught the reader it was a choice. A useful drafting habit is to mark every doubtful detail with a bracket as you go and keep writing, then resolve the whole list in one research session; stopping to verify each candle and coin mid-scene kills momentum and tempts you to show the research off once you have done it.
Neighbours and opposites
Anachronism overlaps with the continuity error, but a continuity error breaks the story's own internal timeline, a bandage switching wrists, while an anachronism breaks history's. It is related to presentism, the historian's word for judging the past by present values, which in fiction shows up as anachronistic minds in period costume. Alternate history is the licensed cousin: it changes the past openly, as premise, which is invention rather than error.
The opposite of anachronism has no single name, but working editors talk about period texture: the accumulation of correctly timed detail that makes a reader trust the whole. The entries on historical fiction and worldbuilding cover how that trust is built.
What poets can take from this
- Verify every object your characters touch; things have birthdates.
- Run suspicious words through an etymology source for first recorded use.
- Read letters and diaries from your period until its attitudes feel normal.
- If you plant an anachronism on purpose, establish it early and keep it consistent.
- Watch the recent past hardest; 1995 is easier to get wrong than 1595.
Try it yourself
Write a scene set in your town exactly one hundred years ago, then list every detail you had to change from the present: objects, words, manners, assumptions. Rewrite the scene once more with a single deliberate anachronism placed where it says something.
Questions
Are all anachronisms mistakes?
No. Accidental anachronisms are errors of research, but deliberate ones are a respected device used for satire, comedy and theme, from Hamilton's casting to modern-voiced historical novels. The difference is control: the deliberate kind is established openly and applied consistently.
How do I check whether a word existed in my story's period?
Look the word up in a dictionary that gives dated first uses, such as a historical or etymological dictionary. Check idioms as whole phrases, not just individual words, since a phrase can be centuries younger than its parts.
Do small anachronisms really bother readers?
The dedicated readers of historical fiction, yes, and they are vocal. But the deeper cost is trust: a spotted error makes readers doubt the story's world generally. Most will forgive a rare slip in a story that otherwise feels inhabited rather than researched.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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