clock in

Idioms  

1. Begin work, as in She clocked in late again. Also, clock out, end work, as in Please wait for me; I forgot to clock out. The allusion here is to punching a time clock, a device that punches the time on a card to record when an employee arrives and departs. [Late 1800s]

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

clock in

With the clock in the red, Leicester 28-19 up and each team having scored three tries, the Bears were attacking hard deep inside the host's half.

From BBC ● Mar. 23, 2026

Celebrities including Kim Kardashian, Rihanna and Taylor Swift make up a handful of the self-made women billionaires, though they tend to clock in on the lower end of the billionaire scale.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 21, 2026

Most of them clock in at around 35 minutes, although the latest season premiere runs just over an hour.

From Salon ● Feb. 7, 2026

He earned his PhD in 2006 from the Graduate School of Science at Nagoya University, where he studied the circadian clock in cyanobacteria.

From Science Daily ● Jan. 13, 2026

The clock in his head was still ticking down.

From "Chasing Lincoln's Killer" by James L. Swanson

Related Words

• arrive
• come
• come out
• crop up
• develop
• emerge
• materialize
• occur
• pop up
• present
• show
• show up
• surface
• turn out
• turn up