Tease definition
- A person who makes fun of or annoys others, as with playful or taunting remarks.
- A flirtatious person.
An example of tease is making a cat chase something they'll never be able to catch.
An example of tease is repeatedly saying to a child that they have a crush on someone.
An example of tease is what a nude dancer does to her customer during a lap dance.
An example of tease is a woman who dances very sexy with someone in a bar for hours and then leaves alone at the end of the night.
An example of tease is making a bouffant hair style.
Was teased by my classmates for being skinny; teased him about driving such a fast car.
“But you're too young to get married,” he teased.
Teased the cat by dangling a string in its face.
Teased their mother to let them stay up late.
The director teased a good performance out of the actors. The researcher teased out the factors involved in the disease.
I was just teasing.
His tease of his friend's little sister.
It took hours to tease out the meaning of the story.
Other Word Forms
Noun
Origin of tease
- Middle English tesen to comb apart from Old English tǣsan
From American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition
- From Middle English tesen, from Old English tÇ£san (“to tease"), from Proto-Germanic *taisijanÄ… (“to separate, tug, shred"), from Proto-Indo-European *dāy- (“to separate, divide"). Cognate with West Frisian tiezje, tiizje (“to baffle, perplex"), Dutch tezen (“to pull, tug, scratch"), German zeisen (“to pluck, pluck apart"), Danish tæse (“to tease"). Related to touse, tose.
From Wiktionary