/twiːk/
OriginFrom 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.
- transitiveTo pinch and pull with a sudden jerk and twist; to twitch.
- informal, transitiveTo adjust slightly; to fine-tune.
“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 ”
“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.”
- transitiveTo tease, to annoy; to get under the skin of (someone, typically so as to irritate them, or by extension to enamor, frighten, etc).
“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 kne”
“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 t”
““Russia needs leadership and he knows how to tweak people.” He grinned, “He made a convert of me,” chuckling. “I wanted to lead him by the hand, now I follow him like a puppy dog.””
- US, intransitive, slangTo abuse methamphetamines, especially crystal meth.
- US, intransitive, slangTo exhibit extreme nervousness, evasiveness when confronted by authorities, compulsiveness, erratic motion, excitability, etc, due to or mimicking the symptoms of methamphetamine abuse.
- broadly, intransitive, slangTo be extremely confused; to have no clue what is happening.
“Am I tweaking or does 2020 feel like 6 months ago?”
“If you didn't think that was a good halftime show you're actually tweaking”
“Some of yall gonna think im tweaking but FRONTIER>>>>>>HUENEME”
- uncommonFrom a catapult, to strike a target with a missile.
- A sharp pinch or jerk; a twist or twitch.
- A slight adjustment or modification.
“He is running so many tweaks it is hard to remember how it looked originally.”
- Trouble; distress; tweag.
- obsolete, slangA prostitute.
“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 shou”
- slangMethamphetamine.
- slangA single inhalation of cocaine.
- An additional input to a block cipher, used in conjunction with the key to select the permutation computed by the cipher.
Formstweaks(present, singular, third-person) · tweaking(participle, present) · tweaked(participle, past) · tweaked(past) · tweaks(plural)