tweak
/twiːk/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.27 in modern English
12
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To tease, to annoy; to get under the skin of (someone, typically so as to irritate them, or by extension to enamor, frighten, etc).
Transitive verb
verb
To exhibit extreme nervousness, evasiveness when confronted by authorities, compulsiveness, erratic motion, excitability, etc, due to or mimicking the symptoms of methamphetamine abuse.
American usage; Intransitive verb; Slang
Example Sentences
- "to tweak the nose."
- "If we tweak the colors towards blue, it will look more natural."
- "Economics is a messy discipline: too fluid to be a science, too rigorous to be an art. Perhaps it is fitting that economists’ most-used metric, gross domestic product (GDP), is a tangle too.[…]But as a foundation for analysis it is highly subjective: it rests on difficult decisions about what counts as a territory, what counts as output and how to value it. Indeed, economists are still tweaking it."
- "Yet on January 10th, only weeks before the charter was due to come into force, the prime minister said his government was tweaking the draft."
- "Oh, he loved to tweak people and say things like "Hiya sweetums" to me because that was not exactly de rigueur in front of a bunch of strong feminists. He had this enormous sense of humor. I never knew what he was going to say."
- "I know what kinds of intervals and melodies tweak people—I know how to make people's skin crawl, how to make them shiver. I can't say it works on all listeners. There are some people, such as overly trained composers and theorists ..."
Etymology
From Middle English twikken, from Old English twiccian (“to pluck”), from Proto-West Germanic *twekkōn (“to fasten; clamp; pinch”). Related to twitch. The drug-related sense may be a blend of twitch and freak.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: twikken, twiccian, *twekkōn