Tickle

How to spell tickle

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tickle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tickle mean?

1. verbTo touch a person or animal lightly so as to cause a fluttering sensation, twitching, or laughter.
2. nounA light fluttering or itching sensation, or the act of tickling.

Tickle in a sentence

• verb

  The soft feather began to tickle her bare arm.

• noun

  A faint tickle in her throat warned her a cough was coming.

• verb

  He liked to tickle the baby's feet to make her giggle.

• noun

  The dust gave him a slight tickle inside his nose.

Where does tickle come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Tickle comes from the Middle English verb tikelen, which meant to touch lightly so as to cause a twitchy, fluttering sensation. Its deeper origin is uncertain, though many scholars connect it to an Old English or Germanic base related to tick and to the idea of a light, repeated touch, with the final -le acting as a frequentative ending that signals a small action done over and over (compare sparkle, crackle, and dribble). Some have even suggested it is a playful reversal of kittle, an old northern word meaning to tickle, but the evidence for that is thin, so the precise route is debated. By the 1300s tickle already carried both the literal sense of provoking laughter through light touch and the figurative sense of pleasing or delighting someone, as preserved today in the phrase tickled pink. The spelling is mostly phonetic, and the main trap is simply remembering the doubled letters and the -le ending rather than -el.

How the word is built

• tickle (Middle English tikelen: to touch lightly)
• no affixes; the -le is a frequentative ending suggesting repeated small actions