July 19, 1996

klick

Somewhere I've gotten into the habit of using "click" to mean both "kilometre" or "kilometre per hour," depending on the context. Can you tell me where this comes from?

I can tell you where the word comes from geographically, but not why it comes from there.

Click, or in its more frequent spelling klick, is a military slang term that was used in the Vietnam War to mean 'a kilometer'. It's in common use, especially in the military, but it is still often associated with Vietnam. There are several less common subsenses, such as 'kilometers per hour' and '1000 yards [rather than meters]'.

The word is first found in the early 1960s among American soldiers in Vietnam, though later recollections claim that it was in use in the 1950s by American soldiers in Germany. Its origin is unknown. The most likely possibility is simply that it's a shortening and alteration of kilometer, since both words have the "k" and "l" sounds in the same order. (The earliest evidence for the word spells it "click," but since "click" is an existing word, the 'kilometer' word may have been conformed to that spelling.) The shortening of words is a common feature of military lingo. But there's no firm evidence for this appealing story; most dictionaries that include the word give the etymology only as "origin unknown."