Made a quick, light clicking sound repeatedly, like a clock, or marked something off a list.
From the Middle Low German 'tikken,' which is imitative in origin—the word itself sounds like the thing it describes. By the 1600s, it was being used for both the sound clocks make and the action of marking items with a tick mark.
Onomatopoeia—words that sound like what they mean—are some of the oldest words in languages because people invented them by mimicking real sounds. The metronome sound 'tick-tock' is so universal that even people who've never heard a mechanical clock recognize it from cartoons and movies!
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