make tick

present singular third person makes tick · participle present making tick · participle past made tick · past made tick

1. colloquialTo cause someone or something to operate the way it does.

   I honestly don't know the specifics that make him tick, and I wish I did.

   2005, Cherie Priest, Four and Twenty Blackbirds, →ISBN, page 91

   4 more examples

   What makes kinky people tick? Is it the desire for cheap thrills? The idea of flaunting social morés? The restless desire for something different than traditional sexual practices?

   2005, Annabelle du Fouet, “Kinksters and kinksterettes—Who are these people, anyway?” (chapter 1), in Weather Balloons Make Rotten Sex Toys, Ellora's Cave, →ISBN, page 22

   Most of us find ourselves caught in the middle, ducking for cover and wondering just who these people are and what could possibly make them tick.

   2012, Kevin Seamus Hasson, The Right to Be Wrong: Ending the Culture War Over Religion in America, →ISBN

   I wanted to roam the world, exploring what made it tick, helping to make it tick better, and never get married.

   2013, Betty Lussier, Intrepid Woman: Betty Lussier's Secret War, 1942-1945, →ISBN

   So what is it that makes SBB (Swiss national railways) tick? In my humble opinion, two things. Firstly, a comprehensive and set-in-stone integrated timetable (incorporating trains, ferries, cable cars and buses, including the world-famous yellow 'post-autos'), compiled four years in advance and which gets tested twice before it becomes operational.

   2025 October 15, Vitali Vitaliev, “The recipe for Swiss bliss”, in RAIL, number 1046, page 68

2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see make, tick.