In the nick of time

If Mary slides into her seat just as the theater lights dim, she might think to herself, “Whew! I made it in the nick of time.” But why does time have a nick in it?

The dictionary defines the noun “nick” as a small notch or groove. As a verb it means to cut into, – he nicked his chin shaving. Or the verb can describe a way of recording a score by means of making a notch in a stick or some other object.

Apparently this last definition is the one most closely associated with time or precision. From ancient times, bones and sticks were notched to help people keep track of things like the number of goats in their herd or the amount of money one person owed another. The Oxford English Dictionary even has an entry for “nick-stick,” a split tally stick used as a form of currency introduced by Henry I in the 12th century.

The method of creating such a device was described in “The Dialogue Concerning the Exchequer:” “The manner of cutting is as follows. At the top of the tally a cut is made, the thickness of the palm of the hand to represent a thousand pounds; then a hundred pounds by a cut the breath of a thumb; twenty pounds, the breath of the little finger; a single pound, the width of a swollen barleycorn; a shilling rather narrower; then a penny is marked by a single cut without removing any wood.”

The stick (usually squared hazel wood) was then split down its length, with half given to each party in the transaction. The details of the transaction were written on both sticks. The irregularities in the pieces of wood, when placed back together, assured that no one had tampered with their stick to reduce or inflate the amount.

The transfer of precision in tallying to precision in time seems logical enough. The website The Phrase Finder quotes Ben Johnson’s play “Pans Anniversary” written around 1637: “For to these, there is annexed a clock-keeper, a grave person, as Time himself, who is to see that they all keep time to a nick.” Also in “Festivals,” written in 1615, Arthur Day wrote: “Even in this nicke of time, this very, very instant.” There might also be a connection between the notches or demarcations to mark time on a clock since table clocks were coming into prominence during the 16th century.

But from precision nicking to modern day usage, the word certainly has undergone some slippage. According to The Phrase Finder: “If someone is now said to be ‘in the nick’ the English would expect him to be found in prison, the Scots would picture him in the valley between two hills and Australians would imagine him to be naked.”