Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun One that teases, as a device for teasing wool.
  • noun One who engages in teasing; a tease.
  • noun A puzzling problem.
  • noun An advertisement that attracts customers by offering something extra or free.
  • noun Slang An attention-getting vignette or highlight, as one presented before the start of a television show.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun One who or that which teases: as, a teaser of oakum.
  • noun The stoker or fireman in glassworks who attends the furnace.
  • noun A dog used in hunting deer.
  • noun Anything which teases, or causes trouble or annoyance.
  • noun An inferior stallion or ram used to excite mares or ewes, but not allowed to serve them.
  • noun A gull-teaser: a sailors' and fishermen's name of sundry predatory birds of the family Laridæ and subfamily Stercorariinæ, as a skua. Also called boatswain, marlinespike, and dung-hunter. See cuts under skua and Stercorarius.
  • noun A name applied by Brush to a magnetizing coil on the field-magnets of his dynamo, the ends of which were connected to the terminals of the machine so as to form an independent circuit with the coil of the armature; the shunt coil in a compound wound dynamo.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun One who teases or vexes.
  • noun (Zoöl.), Prov. Eng. A jager gull.
  • noun (Elec.) A shunt winding on field magnets for maintaining their magnetism when the main circuit is open.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A person or thing that teases
  • noun A short film or quote meant to draw an audience to a film or show.
  • noun UK, dialect A kind of gull, the jaeger.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a device for teasing wool
  • noun a worker who teases wool
  • noun an advertisement that offers something free in order to arouse customers' interest
  • noun a flat at each side of the stage to prevent the audience from seeing into the wings
  • noun an attention-getting opening presented at the start of a television show
  • noun someone given to teasing (as by mocking or stirring curiosity)
  • noun a particularly baffling problem that is said to have a correct solution

Etymologies

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Examples

Comments

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  • Also to make fun of.

    Also an advertising or promotional device intended to arouse interest or curiosity especially in something to follow (el avance de un capítulo, por ejemplo).

    July 7, 2008

  • "Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven't made interstellar contact yet and buzz them (ie: they find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one's ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making "beep beep" noises) Rather childish, really."

    July 21, 2008

  • Ha, neat citation jmp. I don't think we have a HGG list, more's the pity.

    September 20, 2008