chk.

n.  a click mimicking the sound of a pheasant.

<And she must have listened to what they were saying, for now, like somebody imitating the noise that someone else makes, she made a little click at the back of her throat: “Chk.  Chk.”  Then she smiled.  —Virginia Woolf, “The Shooting Party,” The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf: Second Edition.>

n.  the “distinctively short, dry” call of the Brewer’s Blackbird, as described in A Birder's Guide to Minnesota, 4th edition by Kim Eckert.


n.  the call of a lake bird.

<On the north end of the lake a bird called Chk?, and from past Roddy Deepdale’s lodge a second bird answered it: Chk! Chk!  —Peter Straub, Mystery.>

n.  the dull click of a doorknob being twisted, as in the graphic novel Uzumaki 2 by Junji Ito.


n.  the sound of a dart penetrating a dartboard.

<A gentle heft, and chk! the dart is as firm in the number, the double, the bull, as though it had grown from there.  —Keri Hulme, The Bone People.>

n.  the sound of a shovel pushing through sand.

<I listen until my itching subsides, and the nearby scratch of a shovel digging—chk... chk... chk...—is a gentle drumbeat calling me back to life.  —Donald W. George, Japan: True Stories of Life on the Road.>

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