Tinker

How to spell tinker

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tinker

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tinker mean?

1. verbTo make small adjustments or repairs to something in a casual, experimental way.
2. nounA travelling person who mends pots, pans, and other metal household items.

Tinker in a sentence

• verb

  He likes to tinker with the car engine on weekends.

• noun

  The village tinker arrived each spring to repair the kettles.

• verb

  The committee continued to tinker with the budget rather than rewrite it.

• noun

  An old tinker travelled the country lanes selling and fixing pans.

Where does tinker come from?

Language of origin: Other

Tinker first appears in English in the 1200s and 1300s as a name for a travelling mender of pots, kettles, and other metal household goods. The most likely source is the light, repetitive 'tink' or 'tinkle' of the small hammer striking metal, with the agent ending -er attached, so a tinker was literally 'one who makes the tinking sound'. Because such menders wandered from place to place and had a reputation for rough living, the word picked up a string of slang and sometimes dismissive uses over the centuries. The modern verb meaning, to fiddle with or make small adjustments to something, grew naturally out of the image of a tinker poking and patching at a damaged pot. That sense, casual unfocused mending, is now the most common one and explains why we 'tinker with' an engine or a plan rather than properly fixing it.

How the word is built

• tink (imitative of light metallic tapping)
• -er (agent/iterative suffix)