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]

---

Example Sentences

"Around 200 people have worked tirelessly around the clock in searching for this beautiful little girl who went missing five days ago," Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro said.

From BBC • Apr. 30, 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

In one instance, he exploited a loophole in the rulebook that allowed the Titans to eat up nearly two minutes of clock in the fourth quarter without running any plays, simply by committing presnap penalties.

From The Wall Street Journal • Feb. 2, 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

There’s a sad sort of clanging From the clock in the hall And the bells in the steeple too.

From "The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy

Related Words

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