"Seed head of a dandelion" sense from a children's game in which one supposedly tells the time by counting the number of puffs taken to blow away all the seeds, each puff representing one hour of the day.
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.
1980, AA Book of British Villages, Drive Publications Ltd, page 163:
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.
1995, Richard Klein, “Introduction”, in Cigarettes are sublime, Paperback edition, Durham: Duke University Press, published 1993, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 8:
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.
1905, Arthur Morrison, “Chance of the Game”, in Pall Mall Magazine[1], volume 35, pages 216-222:
But if the clock was a red 'un, and the opportunity undoubted; to be pinched in the Bow Road merely might well imply loss of caste in the mob, but nobody need be ashamed to be pinched anywhere for a gold watch, after all.
Clock originally denoted a mechanical timekeeping device that was able to mark the time with chimes or another sounding mechanism, distinguished from a timepiece which had no such mechanism and a horologe and other terms inclusive of sundials, clepsydras, and similar devices. Clock is now the general term for all timekeeping devices, inclusive of aspects of software that tracks and displays the time, but as an everyday physical object it is distinguished from a small wearable watch and sometimes from nonmechanical timekeeping devices.
Synonyms
(instrument used to measure or keep track of time):Seechronometer
The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
2005, Jr. Aaron Bryant, Cupid Is Stupid[2], page 19:
It is true. Carmen is an official gold digger. In fact, she is an instructor at the school of gold digging. Hood rats have been clocking her style for years. Wanting to pull the players she pulled, and wishing they had the looks she had.
Cut to the pub on a lads night out, / Man at the bar cos it was his shout, / Clocks this bird and she looks OK, / Caught him looking and she walks his way,
2021, Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation[3], Random House, →ISBN:
First it was only when I was with him—we would pass a pretty girl, I would notice her first, and my eyes would dart to his to see him clock her.
2021 July 1, Nick Oldham, Scarred, Severn House Publishers Ltd, →ISBN:
He made it to ten yards away. Still they hadn't clocked him. Five yards. He felt increasingly confident about grabbing the actual thief, even if it meant letting the other lad get away. Both were pretty scrawny kids, although the other one was quite a bit older, maybe twenty,[…]
2021 December 29, Stephen Roberts, “Stories and facts behind railway plaques: Lancaster (1860)”, in RAIL, number 947, page 58:
I had just long enough at Lancaster to clock another plaque to a great Victorian railway engineer, Joseph Locke (1805-60).
I'd already clocked her as someone who couldn't reliably be believed when she spoke. And now this too!
2000, Phil Austin, Naugahide Days: The Lost Island Stories of Thomas Wood Briar[4], page 109:
Bo John and I twisted our heads around as Miranda braked over to the gravelly shoulder, let the Scout wheeze to a stop. She was climbing out, hurrying back to whatever had caught her eye. Bo John leered into the door mirror, clocking her flouncing, leggy strut.
Once my transition was complete I considered moving to London, where I felt there was less chance of being clocked and a larger support network.
2018 September 14, Nicola Frost, Tom Selwyn, Travelling towards Home: Mobilities and Homemaking, Berghahn Books, →ISBN, page 23:
Jaz said that the palpitations of fear he used to experience at the prospect of being publicly outed in the gurdwara dissipated after he clocked other gay Sikhs in there, even one who professed a Jat caste identity, he said – Jatness being associated with stereotypical dominant macho masculinity. He reflected that this was a major factor in his rapprochement with his[…]
Consuella Lopez, the director of operations and housing at Casa Ruby, remembers. "The more passable your body was, the less bullying you'd get, the more chances of you getting a regular job at a regular place without somebody clocking you."
2022 February 1, Townsand Price-Spratlen, Addiction Recovery and Resilience: Faith-based Health Services in an African American Community, State University of New York Press, →ISBN:
Jess was a sixty-something, short, White, bald man who could easily be "clocked" as gay.
2022 March 1, Charlie Markbreiter, “"Other Trans People Make Me Dysphoric": Trans Assimilation and Cringe”, in The New Inquiry[6]:
Quarantine had thrown a new wrench "do not perceive me" discourse, but trans people have arguably always had a messy relationship to being perceived. We avoid it, and yet we also juice our lives to be seen. Getting clocked feels bad, but being hot feels good.
1882, W.S. Gilbert, “When you're lying awake”, in Iolanthe, or The Peer and the Peri[10]:
But this you can't stand, so you throw up your hand, and you find you're as cold as an icicle, In your shirt and your socks (the black silk with gold clocks), crossing Salisbury Plain on a bicycle
1894, William Barnes, “Grammer's Shoes”, in Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect, page 110:
She'd a gown wi' girt flowers lik' hollyhocks An zome stockèns o' gramfer's a-knit wi' clocks
You are visitor 01402503 — GeezerVison does not store the pages you look up. Best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.7 or Internet Explorer 6 at 800×600. No cookies required.
