A bearing turns a vague wave of the hand — "it's over there!" — into a precise three-figure angle. Grab the compass needle and watch every direction get its own number.
Start hereA bearing is a direction written as an angle: how far you'd turn clockwise, starting from north, to face that way. Due east is 090°. Due south is 180°. Due west is 270°. And we always write it with three figures.
Pointing and saying "that way!" works fine when your friend is standing next to you. But a ship's captain radioing for help, a pilot lining up a runway in fog, or a hiker reading a map in the rain can't point at anything — they need a direction that means exactly the same thing to everyone, everywhere. So instead of words like "north-ish, kind of towards the hills," they use one agreed number. That number is a bearing, and by the end of this page you'll be reading and setting them like you've been sailing for years.
Here's the good news: a bearing is built from just three rules, and they never change. Learn these and you've learned the whole topic. A few quick words first. North is the fixed "up" direction every compass agrees on — the starting line for all bearings. Clockwise means turning the way a clock's hands sweep: from 12 round to 3, to 6, to 9 and back. Keep both in your head, because the three rules lean on them.
Always start your angle from the north direction. North itself is the zero line: a bearing of 000°.
Sweep clockwise — north, to east, to south, to west — until you're facing your target. That swept angle is the bearing.
Write every bearing with three digits, padding with zeros if needed. So 5° becomes 005° and 40° becomes 040°.
Rule three trips people up, so let's nail it now. Why fuss over writing 005° instead of just 5°? Because a navigator might scribble a bearing in a hurry, read it aloud over a crackly radio, or glance at it on an instrument. Three figures make the number unmistakable — there's no chance of confusing it with something else, and every bearing lines up the same width, like prices written £05.00 rather than £5. A full turn is 360°, so bearings run from 000° all the way round to 360°, and three digits is always enough to cover them. It's a tiny habit that prevents big mistakes.
This is the heart of the page. Grab the green needle with your finger or mouse and swing it to point any direction you like. As it moves, watch the big readout: that's the bearing — the angle, measured clockwise from north, that you've swept through. The shaded wedge shows exactly that sweep, always starting at the N at the top and curving round clockwise to your needle.
Send it straight right and you'll read 090° — due east. Straight down is 180°, due south. Straight left is 270°, due west. Prefer not to drag? Use the slider, or click into the compass and nudge it with the arrow keys (Page Up / Page Down jump by ten). The buttons snap to the eight main compass points so you can check each one.
The bearing is computed live from the needle's direction — measured clockwise from north and always shown with three figures.
You already know north, south, east and west — the four cardinal (main) directions. Squeeze a direction exactly between two of them and you get the four in-between points: north-east, south-east, south-west and north-west. Written as bearings they fall into a beautifully tidy pattern — each one is 45° further round than the last, because a full circle of 360° split into eight equal slices gives 45° per slice. Burn these eight into memory and you can place almost any bearing at a glance.
Notice north shows up as 000° here, but it's equally correct to call it 360° — both land you on the same line, because a whole turn brings you right back where you started. After 360° you'd just be going round again, so bearings never need a fourth figure.
Once the eight points are in your head, reading any bearing is just a matter of placing it between them. The trick is to ask which "quarter" of the compass the number lands in. Bearings from 000° to 090° point somewhere between north and east. From 090° to 180°, between east and south. From 180° to 270°, between south and west. And from 270° to 360°, between west and north. Here are three worked examples — read how each one is placed.
That's between 000° and 090°, so it's heading north-of-east — past NE (045°) and closing in on due east (090°). Mostly east, leaning a touch north.
Just past 180°, so a little west of due south. From the harbour you'd look almost straight down the compass, nudged slightly toward the west.
Three figures, remember — that's eight degrees, a whisker clockwise of due north. Practically north, but officially written 008°, not 8°.
See the pattern? You don't need to be perfect to read a bearing usefully — you just slot the number between the eight points you memorised and you instantly know the rough direction. A direction in the 90s is east-ish; one in the 270s is west-ish; one just under 360° is almost back to north. That single habit takes a bearing from "a number I have to decode" to "a place on a circle I can already see."
To pin a direction down exactly, you reach for a protractor — a half-circle (or full circle) of degree markings. The method is the same three rules, made physical. First, find your point and draw a faint line straight up for north. Second, lay the protractor's centre on the point with its zero on that north line. Third, count round clockwise to your target and read the number off the scale. That's literally all a navigator does, just with a fancier compass card. And it's exactly what the next demo lets you practise — lining up north, then sweeping clockwise to the spot you want, by eye and by feel.
This is the question that actually wins races and finds harbours: not "which way is north?" but "standing at A, which way is B?" To answer it, you stand at A, face north, and turn clockwise until you're looking straight at B. The angle you turned through is the bearing of B from A. The faint ring around A is your protractor; the dashed line shows where B really lies.
Slide the dial to swing your green aiming-line until it lies right on top of the dashed line to B, then press Check. Your current reading shows in three figures as you go. Stuck? Show me reveals the answer; New map drops B somewhere fresh. Get one right and you'll unlock a little bonus: the back-bearing.
B is placed at an exact bearing from A, so a careful reading lands right on the answer.
That bonus is worth knowing. The back-bearing is the direction back the way you came — the bearing from B to A instead of A to B. Because turning all the way around is half a full circle, the back-bearing is always the original bearing plus or minus 180° (whichever keeps it between 000° and 360°). So if the bearing from your camp to the lake is 110°, then from the lake your camp lies on a bearing of 110° + 180° = 290°. Handy for finding your way home.
Bearings aren't a classroom curiosity — they're how people have crossed oceans, skies and wilderness for centuries, and still do today.
With no roads and no landmarks, sailors steer by bearing. A captain sets a course like "hold 075°" and the helm keeps the bow swung to that number on the compass, hour after hour, until land or the next waypoint appears. Lighthouses and buoys are logged by their bearing too, so a navigator can fix exactly where the ship is.
Pilots fly headings that are bearings in disguise — "turn left, heading 320°" from air-traffic control means swing the nose to a bearing of 320°. Runways are even named after their bearing, rounded and shortened: a runway pointing on a bearing of about 090° is called Runway 09.
And it's not just professionals. A hiker with a map and a handheld compass uses bearings to cross open moorland or thick forest where there's no path to follow: take a bearing off the map to the next peak, set it on the compass, and walk that line. Orienteering — the sport of racing between checkpoints using only a map and compass — is bearings turned into a game. Wherever "which way?" really matters and pointing won't do, a three-figure bearing is the answer everyone trusts.
Here's the trap almost everyone falls into. You see a direction that's a little above due east, and your brain wants to say "that's about 10° up from east" — measuring from the closest axis, sometimes even turning anticlockwise because it feels shorter. A bearing never works that way. It always starts at north, and it always goes clockwise. No shortcuts, no nearest-axis, no backwards turns.
The same green direction. Measured the wrong way — a tiny hop up from east — you might call it "10°." Measured properly, clockwise from north, it's a bearing of 080°.
Whenever a bearing feels surprisingly large, that's usually the clue you're doing it right: a direction near west is 270°-ish, not "90° from south." Start at north, turn clockwise, count the whole way.
Eight rapid questions to lock it in. Tap an answer; you'll see straight away whether it's right, then move to the next. Aim to clear all eight.
Every bearing begins from the north line. North is 000° (and 360°).
Sweep clockwise to your target. East is 090°, south 180°, west 270°.
Always write three digits — 005°, 040°, 200° — so the direction is never in doubt.