Sekirov Dictionary

twiddle

/ˈtwɪdəl/

noun 8
verb 4
forms 3
phrases 1

noun8

•
A slight twist with the fingers.
- He put away the receiver with a twiddle of pudgy fingers. — 2011
•
A wiggling movement.
- Instead, flagellar motion causes the bacterium to swim smoothly (called a run), then stop and tumble (a twiddle), followed by another period of smooth swimming — 1998
•
A tiny bit.
- Trying to tune in on your own face color is a bit like that: a twiddle too red, a twiddle too pale, and the whole image goes haywire. — 1968
•
A small decorative embellishment.
- A great many fidgety occupations will come to an end: we shan’t put a pattern on a cloth or a twiddle on a jug-handle to sell it, but to make it prettier and to amuse ourselves and others. — 1887
•
A small musical flourish.
- “Oh, auntie,” she exclaims, “these great Goths of Englishmen put a twiddle into the last bar of the ‘Minstrel Boy,’ just fancy that!” — 1899
•
A tilde.
- For those places which feed input arcs leading to more than one transition, a “twiddle” symbol (e.g., ‘~’) may be used as the enabling predicate for one of the transitions. — 1985
•
A drawn line that is curvy or twisted.
- Professional scribes (French, Burgundian, what you will) must sometimes have spoiled a copy – duplicated a word, misplaced a twiddle. — 2012
•
A tizzy.
- Hey, diddle, diddle, we’re all in a twiddle, / Although we’re cuffed and we’re cuffed, / To be quite exact we cannot act, / For, you see, we are all of us stuffed. — 1938

verb4

•
To wiggle, fidget or play with; to move around.
- She sat and nervously twiddled her hair while she waited.
To play with anything; hence, to be busy about trifles.
To flip or switch two adjacent bits (binary digits).
To be in an equivalence relation with.

forms

twiddled · twiddling · twiddles

Phrases with twiddle

twiddle one's thumbs
to circle one's thumbs around one another, usually with the fingers interlaced, usually done idly while waiting or bored

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