tweak
English
Etymology
From Middle English twikken, from Old English twiccian (“to pluck”), from Proto-Germanic *twikkijōną (“to clamp; pinch”). Cognate with German Low German twicken (“to pinch”), German zwicken (“to nip; pinch; tweak”). Related to twitch.
Pronunciation
- Rhymes: -iːk
Noun
tweak (plural tweaks)
- A sharp pinch or jerk; a twist or twitch.
- a tweak of the nose.
- A slight adjustment or modification.
- He is running so many tweaks it is hard to remember how it looked originally.
- Trouble; distress; tweag.
- (obsolete, slang) A prostitute.
- 1638, Richard Brathwait, Barnabae Itinerarium: or Drunken Barnaby's four journeys to the north of England : In latin and english metre, Thomas Gent (1852), page 113:
- Thence to Bautree, as I came there, / From the bushes near the lane, there / Rush'd a tweak in gesture flanting / With a leering eye, and wanton : / But my flesh I did subdue it / Fearing lest my purse should rue it.
- 1638, Richard Brathwait, Barnabae Itinerarium: or Drunken Barnaby's four journeys to the north of England : In latin and english metre, Thomas Gent (1852), page 113:
- (cryptography) An additional input to a block cipher, used in conjunction with the key to select the permutation computed by the cipher.
Translations
a sharp pinch or jerk; a twist or twitch; as, a tweak of the nose
a slight adjustment or modification
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a prostitute
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Verb
tweak (third-person singular simple present tweaks, present participle tweaking, simple past and past participle tweaked)
- (transitive) To pinch and pull with a sudden jerk and twist; to twitch.
- to tweak the nose.
- (transitive, informal) To adjust slightly; to fine-tune.
- If we tweak the colors towards blue, it will look more natural.
- 2013 August 3, “Boundary problems”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8847:
- 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.
- (transitive) To twit or tease.
- (intransitive, US, slang) To abuse methamphetamines, especially crystal meth.
- (intransitive, US, slang) To exhibit symptoms of methamphetamine abuse, such as extreme nervousness, compulsiveness, erratic motion, excitability; possibly a blend of twitch and freak.
- (intransitive, US, slang) To exhibit extreme nervousness, evasiveness when confronted by law enforcement or other authority (e.g., customs agents, border patrol, teacher, etc.), mimicking methamphetamine abuse symptoms.
Translations
to pinch and pull with a sudden jerk and twist; to twitch.
to slightly adjust or modify
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- The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables, removing any numbers. Numbers do not necessarily match those in definitions. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout#Translations.
References
- Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, Springfield, Massachusetts, G.&C. Merriam Co., 1967
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