Other forms: clocks, clocked, clocking
A clock is the thing that tells you the time from a wall or a shelf. A round face, two hands, numbers round the edge, and a tick you only notice at night.
The line between a clock and a watch is fixed and worth learning: a watch is worn on the body, a clock is not. English piles up the kinds - alarm clock, cuckoo clock, grandfather clock, the green digits on the oven. As a verb, to clock someone is to measure their speed, so the police clocked her at ninety; to clock in and clock off is to record your hours at work; to clock up is to pile up miles or years. In a game there is a clock running, and in chess it is the double timer the players slap after each move. Round the clock means all day and all night, against the clock means with time running out, and turning back the clock is the thing nobody can do.
1nounclockA device fixed to a wall or standing on a surface that shows the time.~69%
“The kitchen clock has been five minutes fast for years.”
2nountimerThe timer that shows how much time a game or task has left.~27%
“There were nine seconds on the clock when he scored.”
3verbmeasureTo measure someone's speed or time.~2%
“The radar gun clocked the bowler at ninety miles an hour.”
4verbrecordTo record the moment you arrive at or leave work.~2%
“He clocks in at seven and is out of the gate by four.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 19 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense (5 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
clock is a machine that measures time.
Clock reached English around 1370 from Middle Dutch clocke, which meant bell as much as clock, and behind that Medieval Latin clocca, a bell - probably borrowed from Celtic, where Welsh cloch and Old Irish cloc name the same object. The earliest clocks announced the hour by ringing it, and the face came later. That is why German Glocke still means simply bell.
Middle English
clokke
English, today
clock
Built from
From Middle English clokke. First use appears c. 1370. From Middle English clokke, clok, cloke (“clock”), from Middle Dutch clocke (“bell, clock”), from Old Dutch klokka, from Medieval Latin clocca (“bell, clock, cloak”), probably of cel - origin, from Proto-Celtic klokkos (“bell”) (compare Welsh cloch (“bell”), Old Irish cloc (“bell, clock”)), either imitative of the sound or from Proto-Indo-European klek- (“to laugh, cackle”) (compare Proto-Germanic hlahjaną (“to laugh”)). Cognate with Old English clucge (“bell”), stq Klokke (“bell, clock”), Dutch klok (“clock, bell”), Low German Klock (“bell, clock”), German Glocke (“bell”), Danish - and Norwegian klokke (“clock, bell”), Faroese klokka (“clock, bell”), Icelandic klukka (“clock, bell”), Swedish klocka (“clock, bell”), Asturian llueca (“cowbell”), Galician - and Portuguese choca (“cowbell”), a doublet of cloak and cloche.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA