Underdog Stories / Everyday expressions

What Does “In the Nick of Time” Mean?

What does in the nick of time mean and where did it come from? Follow the phrase from an old dinner saying to a tiny mark made at just the right moment.

By Brett Hanson · Underdog Podcasts · September 23, 2026

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Twenty has a theory about old sayings. In the Appraise The Phrase episode “In The Nick of Time,” he compares this one to Janice, a longtime office worker everyone knows but nobody can explain. The phrase needs no introduction. Its meaning does: in the nick of time means at the last possible moment, just before it would be too late.

The catch is that nick once made sense on its own. It could mean a small cut or mark, and it came to mean a precise point in time. The path from one meaning to the other is less certain. So if the question is “what does in the nick of time mean, and where did it come from?”, the answer has a firm end and a few loose threads.

What does in the nick of time mean in a sentence?

Picture Twenty arriving at school as the teacher reaches for the attendance sheet. He remembers the relief of hearing he had made it in the nick of time. No tardy mark. He also remembers the look that might come with the news: the teacher had noticed how close he came.

Cambridge defines the phrase as “at the last possible moment.” That covers the classroom, a train door about to shut, or a meal pulled from the oven before it burns. Something still had to happen, and there was almost no time left for it to happen.

Mario Hines reads out several dictionary definitions during the episode. Twenty chooses Cambridge’s because, he says, it has “trimmed the fat.” Mario agrees that the phrase need not involve a narrow escape from danger. Reaching a deadline with seconds left will do.

There is a small social risk in saying it to someone else. Late enough to worry you, early enough to get away with it: that is the territory the phrase covers. Twenty says the person who greets you with it may be glad you arrived and still wish you had come sooner. It can sound like praise with a raised eyebrow.

The meaning is clear, then. The odd part is the noun. Twenty asks Mario how long a nick lasts. Mario has no answer yet, which is a fair place to start: an English dictionary can tell you when the moment comes, but it cannot give that moment a set number of minutes.

Did people once say “pudding time” instead?

Mario brings out a phrase that makes Twenty stop him: pudding time. In 1546, John Heywood printed a line in which something comes “in puddyng-tyme ryghtly.” A University of Otago text of Heywood’s book preserves the spelling, along with the scene around it. The words describe an arrival that suits the moment.

Twenty hears pudding and thinks of dessert. Mario asks him to imagine a savory dish instead. An older dictionary gives pudding time as the time of dinner, when pudding was eaten first. It also gives the expression a second sense: the critical moment, or the nick of time. Those definitions were still printed in Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary.

That old meal makes the phrase easier to picture. Someone appears when dinner begins, just as the food reaches the table. Twenty and Mario get caught up in the urgency of reaching the pudding. Missing it would be a poor way to enter a room.

The episode goes further. Mario suggests that as sweet pudding moved toward the end of meals, pudding time stopped working and people traded it for nick of time. That is a pleasing story, though the evidence does not show a clean trade. Heywood’s 1546 line proves the older expression was used. Webster’s entry shows it was still understood centuries later, beside nick of time.

The two sayings can be related without one having driven out the other. People have always found more than one way to tell a guest that dinner has started.

Where did “nick” come from?

“Ask me what a nick of time is, I have no idea, Mario.”
— Twenty, on Appraise The Phrase

A nick was a small cut or notch before it was a last-minute rescue. Etymonline dates that sense to the mid-1400s. It records nick on a tally, or counting stick, by the late 1400s. A notch could make a mark exactly where someone wanted one.

Mario points to the old tally sticks used by England’s Exchequer. The marks on them recorded money owed or paid. The sticks could be split along their length so that two matching pieces kept a record of the same deal. Parliament still holds examples, including tallies from the 1290s.

That gives Mario a solid object to hold up in place of an abstract word. It does not give him an hour. In the episode, he says a nick amounted to roughly an hour and jokes that a late student might have had more time than the teacher allowed. The historical accounts found for this story do not establish any fixed span for a nick. Etymonline calls the possible link between timekeeping and notched sticks just that: possible.

A mark has a position. It need not have a duration. Think of a line on a ruler: it tells you where to look, while the space between lines tells you how far. That helps explain how nick could suggest a precise point, even if nobody was counting an hour’s worth of nicks.

When did “nick” become a word for the right moment?

Arthur Golding used nick for timing in his English translation of Ovid. A line about Juno’s anger says another problem comes “in the nicke”: she learns that Semele is pregnant by Jove. The word lands at the instant fresh news makes things worse. The quoted passage appears in the text of Golding’s translation.

Golding was writing in the 1500s, long after the first recorded uses of nick for a cut. Etymonline also notes that nick was used for a critical moment before the full phrase became common. By the 1600s, English writers were putting time after it.

This is the strongest part of the origin story: a word for a small mark came to name an exact moment, then survived in a phrase about arriving at that moment. The weaker part is the claim that we know which mark supplied the image. A tally stick is a good candidate. It remains a candidate.

Mario and Twenty are drawn to the physical detail because it makes the phrase feel less mysterious. Their talk jumps from dinner to wooden sticks, with Twenty asking what a notch actually is. It is a useful question. Once nick has become a word for the moment itself, the full expression no longer asks anyone to find the piece of wood.

Did burning the tally sticks change the phrase?

Mario saves his biggest image for the end of the history: old accounting sticks fed into furnaces beneath the House of Lords. On October 16, 1834, that decision helped set the Palace of Westminster on fire. Parliament says workers burned two cartloads of obsolete tallies. The blaze destroyed both parliamentary chambers, while Westminster Hall survived.

It is hard to blame Mario for wanting that scene in the story. The records were wooden. Someone chose to burn them indoors. Visitors noticed heat and smoke before the fire took hold. Later, J. M. W. Turner painted the burning palace.

The fire does need its own place on the timeline. The phrase’s earlier uses belong to the 1500s and 1600s; the palace burned in 1834. Burning a stockpile of tallies could not have created nick of time, and there is no evidence that the fire changed its meaning. It does show that the old accounting practice had outlived its use by then.

Twenty has an example closer to home. He tells Mario he still thinks he could jump a fence as he once did, though he avoids trying. Mario keeps boxes from old purchases he cannot see himself shipping again. Both know the comfort of leaving a familiar thing where it is.

A phrase is easier to keep than a box. Nobody has to make room under the sink for in the nick of time, and nobody has to find the tally stick. You can say it while someone slips through a door, with the teacher’s raised eyebrow still waiting on the other side.