clock [LME] Like *cloak, clock comes from medieval Latin clocca ‘bell’. The English word originally meant ‘bell’, later taking on the sense ‘the striking mechanism of a watch’. Gradually clock came to be applied not to the sound made by an instrument for telling the time but to the instrument itself. The verb sense ‘to punch or hit in the face’, first recorded in the 1920s, is originally Australian and comes from the slang use of clock to mean ‘a person’s face’ (see also dial). The meaning ‘to notice or watch’, from the 1930s, refers to a person checking the time on a clock.