Teaser

How to spell teaser

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce teaser

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does teaser mean?

1. nounA short advertisement or preview that arouses curiosity without revealing the full content.
2. nounA person who provokes or makes fun of others in a playful way.
3. nounA short puzzle or problem designed to challenge the mind.

Teaser in a sentence

• The studio released a thirty-second teaser before the full trailer.

• Her older brother was a relentless teaser at family dinners.

• The quiz ended with a tricky brain teaser about prime numbers.

• The marketing team built a teaser campaign to hint at the new product.

• The office teaser never let anyone forget an awkward moment.

• She posted a daily teaser to keep her students thinking.

Where does teaser come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows directly from the verb 'tease', which descends from the Old English 'tǣsan', meaning to pull apart, comb, or card wool and other fibres before spinning. The literal sense of separating tangled strands gradually softened into the figurative idea of pulling at someone's patience or feelings, and by the 1600s 'tease' had taken on its modern meaning of provoking playfully. Adding the agent suffix '-er' produced 'teaser', first naming a person who teases and later, in the twentieth century, a short advertisement or preview designed to provoke curiosity without revealing everything. The same fibre-working ancestry survives in the plant name 'teasel', whose bristly heads were once used to raise the nap on cloth. Because the word is built so plainly from 'tease' plus '-er', the only real spelling decision is keeping the silent 'a' from the original 'ease'.

How the word is built

• tease (root, originally to pluck apart)
• -er (agent/noun suffix)