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The description for the Boots of Speed states:

While you wear these boots, you can use a bonus action and click the boots' heels together. If you do, the boots double your walking speed, and any creature that makes an opportunity attack against you has disadvantage on the attack roll. If you click your heels together again, you end the effect.

Obviously, activating the effect requires the use of your bonus action. However, just clicking my heels together should in general have no action economy cost and the sentence describing how to end the effect makes no mention of using your bonus action.

So can I end the effect of Boots of Speed by clicking my heels together without using my bonus action?

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It is unclear, but the implication is bonus action required

I don't want to get into a discussion of grammar mostly because I don't think WotC thinks about grammar in this way. Instead, we can focus on the language of the item itself.

It begins with the requirement of

use a bonus action and click the boots

The sentence about ending the effect focuses on the mechanical action to do so, but does not re-reference the bonus action. Rather than assuming it was a purposeful removal of the bonus action, it is much more likely they are simply referencing the clicking that already has an action assigned to them to click.

In other words, the first sentence defines that to click your heels for item use requires a bonus action. The second part about deactivating assumed you remembered it was a bonus action.

However - this isn't clear and if a DM really wants to allow you to turn this off for 'free', I don't think it'll be a major problem. There are other magic items, like the driftglobe, which work off of verbal commands with no action - not a big deal for this rare item.

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    \$\begingroup\$ It's also probably worth noting that the action-economy cost of deactivating the boots would probably only matter while in combat – and since 1 round only takes 6 seconds, I doubt most people wearing these boots are going to bother deactivating them (so you don't use all of the 10 minutes you can use them per day) in the middle of combat anyway. You probably wouldn't care about deactivating them until the fight's over anyway, and thus it generally wouldn't matter whether deactivating it is an action, a bonus action, or just something you can do for free. \$\endgroup\$
    – V2Blast
    Jul 27, 2022 at 19:37
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    \$\begingroup\$ Another interesting fact about the boots: their property only recharges (with a long rest) once they have been used for a total of 10 minutes. So if you used it for 9 minutes and went to rest, the next day you'll only have 1 minute left. \$\endgroup\$
    – Mr_Bober
    Jul 27, 2022 at 22:25
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Mr_Bober - which is a bit weird, since one would then just state they click the heels before resting, burn up the remaining few minutes, and then have them fully recharge during the long rest. \$\endgroup\$
    – Jon Custer
    Jul 28, 2022 at 15:15
  • \$\begingroup\$ @JonCuster Agreed, not sure why they were designed this way but the text is very specific about the condition of its recharge. \$\endgroup\$
    – Mr_Bober
    Jul 28, 2022 at 18:36
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It doesn't say, so it's up to your DM. I'd think you'd get to turn them off for 'free. It would be easy to argue you'd need a bonus action. Given the boots word for 10 minutes per long rest, that's 100 rounds of use, you're probably going to be out of combat by the time you turn them off in most cases.

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