I have a few clocks in my house; the old wind-up kind. But I haven’t wound them since I began podcasting. They made too much noise.

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It wasn’t just the ticking of the clocks, it was the chiming of their bells. I’d be sitting there trying to record a podcast episode and if it wasn’t the phone ringing or the doorbell, it was the clocks gonging away.

And believe it or not, this has something to do with the etymology of the word clock.

Years ago I remember hearing about a child who’d grown up reading the time from digital clocks so that they’d never learned to read the time on a clock that had hands to mark off the hours.

Later when I had my own children—in a house with a bunch of ticking, chiming clocks—I was surprised one day when I asked my daughter to tell me the time. She was standing right beside the digital clock on the nightstand. She looked around and evidently didn’t even recognize that thing with numbers glowing on it to be a clock.

The word clock appeared first in English in the 9^th century but at first it didn’t mean a device for measuring time. At that point in English it was still hanging on to an older meaning that had already evolved in Latin into the timepiece meaning.

At that point clock meant “bell.”

It reappeared in English in 1371 as a word that had moved from Latin to French before showing up in English and by this point it did mean a machine that counted off the hours.

It was the fact that this machine informed people of the time by clanging away on a bell that got it to be called by the same word that a bell itself was called.

One of the clocks in my house is what you might call a grandfather clock.

Clock enthusiasts would call it a long case clock.

It evolved because clocks were not very accurate until some smart person figured out how to use a long pendulum to keep regular spaces between the ticks.

At first this meant that clocks were set on shelves high on the wall with a hole cut in the shelf for the pendulum to hang through.

Later people thought it might be prettier to enclose the swinging pendulum in a high case. I suppose that kept if from inaccuracies induced by small children and dog’s tails as well.

Grandfather clocks only started to be called grandfather clocks after a popular song came out in 1876. It was by Henry Work and called Grandfather’s Clock and told the tale of a high case clock that kept perfect time for 90 years but stopped when the owner died.