Other forms: clicking, clicks, clicked
A click is a short hard sound: a light switch, a seatbelt, a door shutting properly. It is also what you do with a mouse — you point at something on the screen and click.
The word covers the whole family of small sharp noises. Your knee clicks going up stairs, your heels click on a tiled floor, a camera clicks. On a computer you click on a link, double-click a file, right-click for a menu, and the preposition is on rather than at: click on the blue button. The other use is about people and ideas — two strangers meet and click, meaning they get on at once, and a difficult lesson finally clicks when the understanding arrives all in one piece. Advertisers count clicks and sell them, which is where clickbait comes from.
1verbclickTo press the button on a mouse to choose something on a screen.~49%
“Click on the blue link to continue.”
2nounshortA short sharp sound.~40%
“There was a click and the light went out.”
3verbsharpTo make that short sharp sound.~9%
“Her heels clicked all the way down the corridor.”
4verbsuddenlyTo suddenly make sense, or to get on with someone straight away.~2%
“The two of them clicked the moment they met.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 83 sentences found in the wild and placed 54 of them on a sense (29 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: tap
The word is the sound. Click was made by imitation in the fifteen hundreds, and half the neighbouring languages made almost the same word for the same noise — Dutch klikken, Danish klikke, Swedish klicka, German klicken. There is a second click underneath it as well, from Old French clique, a latch: the thing that does the clicking.
imitative of the sound of the "click" sound; first recorded in the 1500s. Compare stq klikke (“to click”), Middle Dutch clicken (Modern Dutch: klikken (“to click”)), Old High German klecchen (Modern German: klecken, klicken (“to click”)), Danish klikke (“to click”), Swedish klicka (“to click”), Norwegian klikke (“to click”), Norwegian klekke (“to hatch”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA