klick
Pluralklicks
- 1A unit of distance equal to one kilometer, used chiefly in military slang.
The patrol reported the enemy position three klicks to the north.
We still have one klick to cover before we reach the camp.
Similarkilometer
Note
Soldiers' shorthand for distance, probably a clipped way of saying kilometer that keeps the k and l sounds so it cannot be mistaken for kilo, the kilogram. That is the same logic behind a military spelling alphabet. Another story hears in it the tick of a military odometer. It counts like any noun: half a klick downriver, three klicks north. Science fiction took it up readily, from Dan Simmons's The Fall of Hyperion (1990) to Robert J. Sawyer's Hominids (2002).
- 2A unit of speed equal to one kilometer per hour, used in informal speech.
The pilot held the aircraft steady at four hundred klicks.
Cutting the throttle dropped the boat's speed by a klick almost at once.
Note
Speed borrowed from the distance meaning: drop the "per hour" and klicks alone stands for kilometers per hour. It is normally plural, as in doing a hundred klicks, so a singular klick almost always means distance. When a rate is spelled out, as in Robert J. Sawyer's fifteen klicks per second, the word has gone back to being a plain kilometer.
- 3Alternative spelling of click.
Klick! The latch dropped neatly into place behind them.
A faint klick told her the recorder had finally started.
Note
A separate word that only shares its letters with the soldier's kilometer. It is a respelling of click and lives mostly as an interjection that imitates the sound itself: a latch falling, a switch thrown, a lock catching. The other senses of click, such as the click consonants of phonetics, a dolphin's call or a mouse click, belong to the ordinary spelling.
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Origin
This is most likely a shortened pronunciation of "kilometer," chosen as a brief word that stresses the k+l sound. It is possibly instead onomatopoeic, imitating the "click" sound a soldier's rifle gas regulator made when signaling that 1,000 meters had been covered.