Tick

How to spell tick

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tick

What does tick mean?

1. nounA small written mark used to show that something is correct, present, or completed.
2. verbTo mark an item with a small stroke to show it is correct or completed.
3. nounA small blood-feeding parasitic arachnid that attaches to the skin of animals and people.
4. nounThe short, sharp clicking sound made repeatedly by a clock or watch.
5. nounAn informal word for a very short moment or instant.

Tick in a sentence

• noun

  She put a tick next to each item she had packed.

• verb

  Please tick the box if you want to receive our newsletter.

• noun

  After the hike she found a tick buried in her ankle.

• noun

  The steady tick of the kitchen clock filled the quiet room.

• noun

  The technician said he would be ready in a tick.

• noun

  A green tick on the form confirmed the payment had cleared.

Where does tick come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word tick actually braids together a few strands that happen to share one tidy spelling. The blood-feeding insect is the oldest: Old English had a form like ticia or teke for the small parasite, a word with cousins across the Germanic family such as Dutch teek and German Zecke. The 'light tap' sense, from which the clock sound and the written mark both grew, appeared in late Middle English and is largely imitative; it echoes the small sharp noise itself and is related to Dutch tik, meaning a light touch or pat. From that gentle-tap idea English developed the quick pen stroke used to mark something as checked or correct, recorded from the 1800s. The informal British phrase 'on tick', meaning on credit, is a separate shortening of the word ticket. Because all these meanings collapsed onto the same short, blunt spelling, the spelling itself stays mercifully simple even though the history is tangled.

How the word is built

• tick (single root; not built from prefix or suffix)

Words that sound like tick

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• tic: A sudden, repeated, involuntary movement or spasm of a muscle, often in the face, or a habitual nervous mannerism.