1. Word finder
  2. Word definitions
  3. biological clock

Find the word definition

What is "biological clock"

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
biological clock
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ It's the men now, as often as not, who hear the biological clock ticking loudest.
▪ Of course, nature being unjust as ever, I have no biological clock of my own.
▪ The ticking of the biological clock.
▪ The way Max's biological clock is ticking, it's a wonder Emma didn't call out the bomb squad.
▪ Unlike mechanical clocks, which are completely blind to their surroundings, a biological clock gets reset every day by the sun.
Wiktionary
biological clock

n. 1 (context biology English) Any of several mechanisms that regulate the periodicity of biological functions. 2 The progression from puberty to menopause during which a woman can bear children.

WordNet
biological clock

n. an innate mechanism in living organisms that controls the periodicity of many physiological functions

Wikipedia
Biological clock

Biological clock may refer to:

  • Age and female fertility, decrease of female fertility with advancing maternal age
  • Ageing, biological programme that limits the lifespan of an individual
  • Circadian clock, a molecular mechanism that results in a circadian rhythm in a living organism
  • Circadian rhythm, biological process that displays an oscillation of about 24 hours, such as the human sleep-wake cycle (the "body clock")
  • Epigenetic clock, a set of DNA sites whose methylation levels can be used to measure aging throughout the body
  • Molecular clock a technique that uses the mutation rate of a biomolecule to deduce the time in prehistory when two life forms diverged
  • Vernalisation the induction of flowering by prolonged exposure to low temperatures, as during the winter in a temperate climate

Usage examples of "biological clock".

With so many time zone shifts he had little idea what his own biological clock was doing.

I have no need for a computer, and with my biological clock ticking faster than yours, I have no time for one.

For all practical purposes, tabulone had stopped the biological clock.

She knew that they could be removed easily enough by the most elementary tissue manipulation, and she would not have given them a second thought two days before, but now they served as a reminder of the biological clock that was ticking away inside her: the clock that would need to be reset when she was eighty or ninety years old, and again when she turned a hundred and fifty….

You spent six weeks, six months, a year in space, aging only by your biological clock inside.

This was why Special Agent Gil Bird at Quantico, busy working on the Charlotte serial murders, would have pinned the female pervert's age at a reasonable forty or fifty, her biological clock a phantom-pain of time, ticking only in her imagination.

Like a woman barren with age, their biological clock had stopped, and with it had died their sense of themselves as a living, ever-renewed species.

Her biological clock, she reasoned, thought it was about four in the morning.

It might perhaps be simply the ticking of the biological clock, the joy in being alive.