Meaning of Nick | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A small cut in a surface.
   archaic
2. A particular place or point considered as marked by a nick; the exact point or critical moment.
   archaic
3. Clipping of nickname.
   Internet, abbreviation, alt-of, clipping
4. A nix or nixie (“water spirit”).
   archaic
5. A diminutive of the male given name Nicholas.
6. A notch cut crosswise in the shank of a type, to assist a compositor in placing it properly in the stick, and in distribution.
   dated
7. Senses connoting something small.
8. A small deflection of the ball off the edge of the bat, often going to the wicket-keeper for a catch.
9. One of the single-stranded DNA segments produced during nick translation.
10. The point where the wall of the court meets the floor.
11. Often in the expressions in bad nick and in good nick: condition, state.
    Commonwealth, Ireland, UK, colloquial
12. A police station or prison.
    Commonwealth, Ireland, UK, slang

Equivalents

Examples

“in the nick of time”

“When I imagin man fraughted with al the commodities may be wiſhed; […] I finde him to ſinke vnder the burthen of his eaſe, and perceive him altogether vnable to beare ſo pure, ſo conſtant, and ſo vniverſall a ſenſualitie. Truely he flies when he is even vpon the nicke, and naturally haſtneth to eſcape it, as from [a] ſtep whereon he cannot ſtay or containe himſelfe, and feareth to ſinke into it.”

“[…] ſuffred the fatall threed to bee ſpunne out to that length for ſome politique reſpects, and then to cut it off in the very nicke.”

“He felt that he was restored to consciousness in the right nick of time, for the especial purpose of holding a conference with the second messenger despatched to him through Jacob Marley's intervention.”

“Here ended, then, / Progress this way. When, in the very nick / Of giving up, one time more, came a click / As when a trap shuts – you're inside the den!”

“A nick is a hollow cast crossways in the shanks of types, to make a distinction readily between differnt sorts and sizes; and to enable the compositor to perceive quickly the bottom of the letter as it lies in the case, when composing; as nicks are always cast on that side of the shank on which the bottom of the face of the letter is placed. A great deal of inconvenience frequently arises, owing to the founders casting different founts of types with a similar nick in each.”

“The types are of the usual thickness and height. In the centre of each type, in the front, is a deep nick of a dovetail shape, which fits upon a metal edge, so that the type cannot be displaced. But of 111 letters which are required in the fount, each letter has two, three, or four other nicks cut at right angles, the nicks of no one letter being the same as another.”

“Just as a judge may mistakenly believe in the credibility of a clever liar, thereby reaching an 'incorrect decision', an umpire dealing with the blur of a fast bowler and listening for a nick of the bat, or lifting his eyes quickly from the bowler's front foot to follow the flight and pitch of the ball to determine if the batter is out LBW [leg before wicket], can easily be mistaken.”

“Analysis of the effect of temperature on the polymerization reaction with nicked and gapped DNA substrates in Mn²⁺ (8) [...] reveals identical values of activation energy (Eₐ) and Q₁₀, indicating that the frequency of productive interactions of polymerase β with 3′-hydroxyl termini at nicks and gaps is indistinguishable and suggesting that localized destabilization of the 5′-terminated DNA strand at the nick site does not contribute significantly to the rate-determining step(s) of the synthetic reaction.”

“The double-stranded insert and linearized vector are denatured, and the resulting single strands of DNA anneal with their overlapping ends and extend using each other as a template to form double-stranded circular plasmids with only two nicks, one on each single strand. [...] Lastly, the nicks are covalently closed upon transformation into E. coli using its natural repair processes.”

“The nick translation process is simply a replication of DNA in vitro with DNA polymerase I (Klenow fragment) and radioactive nucleotide, which becomes incorporated into the duplicated DNA at a nick (break).”

“Spin is a major feature of real tennis – because of it, some of the slowest shots can be the hardest to return. [...] Strokes played into the "nick" (the corner of the floor and the wall) and aggressive drives into the dedans, the winning gallery, or the grille are unreturnable.”

“The car I bought was cheap and in good nick.”

“[F]urther south in Kent, there was St. Mildred, whose mother [Domne Eafe], in 670, founded the minster that still stands there in good nick, with nine nuns who are an ever-present help in trouble to all religions and none.”

“[…]considering they've abused their bodies with everything from M and G to crystal meth over the course of the last day or so, some longer, they look in pretty good nick.”

“More unexpectedly, older tech and hardware stocks seem in decent nick, Mr Ives notes.”

“He was arrested and taken down to Sun Hill nick [police station] to be charged.”

“He’s just been released from Shadwell nick [prison] after doing ten years for attempted murder.”

“I recall too that the chats in the back of the [police] van weren't too bad as they dispatched me to the nick.”

“Poor Billy, he got seven years and he died in the nick in Liverpool in January 1958. Tragedy, he was such a good man, the best. He had a big funeral back in Clerkenwell. Eva went to it. I was in the nick down south at the time.”

““They say he's a friend of Stuart's who he met in the nick down south. No one in Brisbane knows him.” “Not that anyone would admit to it anyway.””

“a user’s reserved nick on an IRC network”

“/nick Changes your nickname—the name by which other IRCers see and refer to you—to anything you'd like (but remember that nine characters is the maximum nick length).”

“Also, ERC, like Emacs, is extremely modular and flexible. It is, of course, a free software program, but there are also many existing modules from nick highlighting to autoaway that you can use.”

“[A]midst Ahriman and his hosts who had now established themselves in the Occident, and as heirs to the horns and tails of Pans and fauns, a crowd of native spirits moved; imps, giants, trolls, forest-spirits, elves and hobgoblins in and on the earth; nicks, river-sprites in the water, fiends in the air, and salamanders in the fire.”

“His name is Nick. I love it. It makes him seem nice, and regular, which he is. When he tells me his name, I say, 'Now, that's a real name.'”

“You look at the groypers, you look at Nick Fuentes, you look at people who are by any measure white supremacists and people we would have called the kooky Nazi right, with their Pepe the Frog memes — they all felt very ill at home in Mitt Romney’s Republican Party.”

CEFR level