stop someone's clock

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English

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Verb

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stop someone's clock (third-person singular simple present stops someone's clock, present participle stopping someone's clock, simple past and past participle stopped someone's clock)

  1. (slang) To kill someone.
    Synonyms: see Thesaurus:kill
    • 2004, Bennett Foster, Gila City, page 147:
      "You wouldn't last thirty minutes if I wasn't behind you," Dandy Bob snapped. "Somebody would stop your clock, only they're afraid of me."
    • 2005, Ralph Compton, Bullet Creek:
      Navarro aimed his cocked Colt at Homer Winters's fear-etched face. “Come and pick him up before I stop his clock.”
    • 2016, Smiley Bonds, The People’s Hope:
      I cannot let it stop my clock, I'm far from the end of my road.
  2. (slang) To clean someone's clock; to make incapable of action; to thwart.
    • 1936, Vincent McHugh, Caleb Catlum's America, page 23:
      Mom wasn't in no mood for lallygagging and she give him a look that stopped his clock.
    • 1981, James Barnett, The Firing Squad, page 206:
      Somebody who played a grim little war-game with him; not wanting to kill him, only to kill time, to stop his clock for a couple of hours.
    • 2011, Derek Robinson, Hullo Russia, Goodbye England:
      “He wasn't going to change his tune,” Tucker said. “So I stopped his clock. Now he knows not to bugger us about.”
    • 2022, Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead:
      Those words, from her mouth, stopped my clock.
  3. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see stop,‎ clock.
    • 2015, Andy Soltis, Chess Lists, page 11:
      Yet when Garry Kasparov failed to stop his clock after making a move in a World Championship match, it was his opponent, Anatoly Karpov, who was criticized for failing to alert him.