Definition
nounA chronometer, an instrument that measures time, particularly the time of day.
nounA common noun relating to an instrument that measures or keeps track of time.
Sentence Examples
The film started at 2 o'clock.
You must come back before nine o'clock.
She heard the clock strike midnight.
Word Origin & History
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 Celtic origin, from Proto-Celtic *klokkos (“bell”) (compare Welsh cloch (“bell”), Old Irish cloc (“bell, clock”)), either onomatopoeic or from Proto-Indo-European *klek- (“to laugh, cackle”) (compare Proto-Germanic *hlahjaną (“to laugh”)). Cognate with Old English clucge (“bell”), Saterland Frisian 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”), Doublet of cloak and cloche.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"The seasons bring the flower again,
And bring the firstling to the flock;
And in the dusk of thee, the clock
Beats out the little lives of men."
— 1850, [Alfred, Lord Tennyson], “Canto II”, in In Memoriam, London: Edward Moxon, […], →OCLC:
"An interesting feature of the church is the invisible clock, which you can hear thumping away as you enter. Constructed in 1525, it is one of the oldest timepieces in England. It chimes the hours and the quarters, and every three hours it plays a hymn. But it has no faces."
— 1980, AA Book of British Villages, Drive Publications Ltd, page 163:
"In the June days of 1848 Baudelaire reports seeing revolutionaries (he might have been one of them) going through the streets of Paris with rifles, shooting all the clocks."
— 1995, Richard Klein, “Introduction”, in Cigarettes are sublime, Paperback edition, Durham: Duke University Press, published 1993, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 8:
"Executing a NEXT to code takes 7 clocks, or 1.05 microseconds."
— 1984, The Journal of Forth Application and Research, volume 2, page 83:
"The best schedule produced by any hardware algorithm takes 7 clocks, whereas the statically reordered code in Figure 1.2(b) takes only 5 clocks."
— 1990, Joseph F. Traub, Barbara J. Grosz, Annual Review of Computer Science, page 180: