nick

noun

1. (archaic)A small cut in a surface.

   “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!”

2. (dated)A small cut in a surface.

   “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.”

3. Senses connoting something small.

   “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.”

4. Senses connoting something small.

   “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).”

5. Senses connoting something small.

   “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.”

6. (Commonwealth, Ireland, UK, colloquial)Often in the expressions in bad nick and in good nick: condition, state.

   “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.”

7. (Commonwealth, Ireland, UK, slang)A police station or prison.

   “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.””

8. (Internet, abbreviation, alt-of, clipping)Clipping of nickname.

   “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.”

9. (archaic)A nix or nixie (“water spirit”).

   “[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.”

verb

1. (transitive)To make a nick or notch in; to cut or scratch in a minor way.

   “I nicked myself while I was shaving.”

   “This man pauses in his shaving to squint at the piece of paper again, razor hesitant, eye returning anxious but reluctant to the blurred letters. [...] He nicks himself and the tired blood trickles a moment, stops easily these days almost before the cotton-wool sticks.”

2. (transitive)To make a nick or notch in; to cut or scratch in a minor way.

   “The itch of his Affection ſhould not then / Haue nickt his Captain-ſhip, at ſuch a point, / When halfe to halfe the world oppos'd, he being / The meered queſtion?”

   “But, give him port and potent ſack, / From milkſop he ſtarts up Mohack; / Holds that the happy know no hours; / So through the ſtreets at midnight ſcowers, / Breaks watchmen's heads and chairmen's glaſſes, / And thence proceeds to nicking ſaſhes; […]”

3. (rare, transitive)To make a nick or notch in; to cut or scratch in a minor way.

   “The barbarous custom of docking and nicking the tail, and cutting the ears of horses, is too prevalent. [...] [I]n the loss of their tail, they find even a still greater inconvenience. During summer they are perpetually teazed with swarms of insects that either attempt to suck their blood or deposit their eggs in the rectum, which they have no means of lashing off; and in winter they are deprived of a necessary defence against the cold. [From the Boston Yankee.]”

   “Nicking a horse has been generally believed to be attended with much difficulty, and to require great ingenuity and art to perform the operation. The nicking alone, is by far the easiest part, as the curing and pullying requires considerable attention and trouble. Nicking is an operation performed for the purpose of making a horse carry an elegant artificial tail, which adds much to his beauty and value.”

4. (obsolete, transitive)To fit into or suit, as by a correspondence of nicks; to tally with.

   “An Alluſion is as it were a dalliance or playing with words, like in ſound, vnlike in ſense, by changing, adding, or ſubtracting a letter or two; ſo that words nicking and reſembling one the other, are appliable to diffrent ſignifications.”

5. (figuratively, obsolete, sometimes, transitive)To fit into or suit, as by a correspondence of nicks; to tally with.

   “[I]t requires a Critical Nicety both of Wit, and of Judgment, to find out the Genius, or the Propenſions, of a Child, […] The Juſt Seaſon of Doing Things must be Nick'd, and All Accidents Obſerv'd and Improv'd; for Weak Minds are to be as Narrowly Attended, as Sickly Bodies: […]”

6. (obsolete, transitive)To fit into or suit, as by a correspondence of nicks; to tally with.

   “Two balls later, I nick one and it carries beautifully to Peter Bowler at first slip, a complete dolly catch, and he drops it.”

7. (obsolete, transitive)To fit into or suit, as by a correspondence of nicks; to tally with.

   “My old luck: I never nick'd ſeven that I did not throw ames ace three times following.”

   “The points to nick each main have been mentioned before, and the table on dice will show how many chances there are to throw each of these points with 2 dice, which together form the numerator, and 36 (being all the chances on 2 dice) the denominator of the fraction that expresses the probability. If 5 is the main, 5 will be the only nick, and the chances to throw 5 being 4, ⁴⁄₃₆ is the probability, which is 8 to 1 against nicking 5, and the same against nicking 9.”

   “Tom Moor was fond of gaming, and often lost large sums of money; finding his business neglected in his absence, he had a small hazard table set up in one corner of his dining-room, and invited a party of his friends to play at it. [...] [O]ne of them being a constant winner, the others would say, "Damn it, how he nicks them."”

8. (transitive)To make a cut at the side of the face.
9. (Commonwealth, Ireland, UK, colloquial, transitive)To steal.

   “Someone’s nicked my bike!”

   “As I'm on the ground, my bat and one of the stumps are grabbed out of my hands. [...] At that point, I look up and see Adrian [Dale] – with two stumps in his hands! Hugh [Morris] has given him one and his brother Gary, who is a policeman, has seen the bloke who nicked it off me and wrestled it off him and given [it] to Adrian. He didn't get my bat back, though.”

10. (Commonwealth, Ireland, UK, slang, transitive)To arrest.

    “The police nicked him climbing over the fence of the house he’d broken into.”

    “Flick knives were pulled on us, and the group demanded we give them all our money, and passports and everything else we had. [...] They [the police] had nicked the knife gang, (who had stayed there, beating the shit out of Nick), and found our passports.”

    “[...] I was always getting nicked when I was a junkie, so I've had my fair share of skirmishes with the law.”

11. (obsolete, transitive)To give or call (someone) by a nickname; to style.

    “For Warbecke as you nicke him, came to me / Commended by the States of Chriſtendome.”

name

1. A diminutive of the male given name Nicholas.

   “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.”