Tease

How to spell tease

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tease

What does tease mean?

1. verbTo make fun of or provoke someone in a playful or mildly annoying way.
2. nounA person who habitually provokes or makes fun of others playfully.

Tease in a sentence

• verb

  His older brothers always tease him about his messy hair.

• noun

  Everyone knew he was a tease who never meant any real harm.

• verb

  The coworkers like to tease each other about their football teams.

• noun

  Her reputation as a tease made his blushing all the more likely.

Where does tease come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English verb tǣsan, which meant to pull apart, pluck, or comb something, especially to separate the fibres of wool before spinning. It belongs to a broad Germanic family, with relatives in Dutch teezen and older German forms that all carried this sense of teasing out or combing fibres apart. The literal meaning of working at wool gradually gave way, by the 1600s, to the figurative idea of working at a person: pestering, provoking, or playfully irritating them. The textile sense survives in the word 'teasel', the spiky plant head once used to raise the nap on cloth, and in the hairdressing term 'to tease' hair. The spelling keeps the older 'ea' vowel cluster even though it is now pronounced as a long 'ee', which is the small trap for writers who might expect 'teeze'.

How the word is built

• tease (from Old English tǣsan: to pluck or pull apart)