stop someone's clock

English

Verb

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.