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Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. n. A habitual spasmodic muscular movement or contraction, usually of the face or extremities.
  2. v. To have a tic; produce tics.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. n. A habitual spasmodic contraction of certain muscles, especially of the face; twitching; vellication: especially applied to tic-douloureux, or facial neuralgia. See tic-douloureux.
  2. n. An African beefeater or ox-pecker; an ox-bird. See cuts under Buphaga and Textor.

Wiktionary

  1. n. A local and habitual convulsive motion of certain muscles.
  2. n. Shortened form of ticket

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. n. A local and habitual convulsive motion of certain muscles; especially, such a motion of some of the muscles of the face; twitching; velication; -- called also spasmodic tic.

WordNet 3.0

  1. n. a local and habitual twitching especially in the face

Etymologies

  1. French.

Examples

  • “Calculations: Customer SLP tic$tic%originalSLPtic% tic* 16tic% = tic$tic%customerSLPtic%. ` n) tic: = Chr (96)”

    AutoHotkey Community

  • “Mr. Carlin's most disturbing tic is a faux-intimate style.”

    The Wall Street Journal: McCartney Keeps the Biographers at Bay

  • “My personal tic is the overuse, as you mention, of adverbs and speech descriptors (ask, proposed, acknowledged – etc etc!)”

    Dialogue is a dance « Write Anything

  • “One of the things that I learned at Viable Paradise was that this can easily happen by accident — you associate a certain tic or action with writing, and your brain seizes on the connection.”

    Not-so-required for writing «

  • “Such a twitch is usually known as a tic (a word arising from the same root that "twitch" does, perhaps).”

    The Human Brain

  • “The painful muscular spasms associated with trigeminal neuralgia are sometimes referred to as tic douloureux (tik doo-loo-ruh '; "painful twitch" French).”

    The Human Brain

  • “Such as above, I don’t think saying you “really mean to use” a specific language tic is any more forceful than saying that you “mean to use” them.”

    Cataloguing My Tics

  • “While habits are normal, a tic might be a symptom of a health problem.”

    Simon & Schuster: You Raising Your Child

  • “You really have to get over your name-calling tic in order for me to take you seriously.”

    What do you hope happens in Iran? « Dating Jesus

  • “My only real problem with it is that the author has a seriously annoying tic, which is to say he seems to be unable to pen a single chapter without Portentous Utterances Of Impending Doom, of the "Little did they know --" variety.”

    the winds are crying remember me through the holy silence of the desert and the sea

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‘tic’ has been looked up 2029 times, loved by 1 person, added to 10 lists, and has a Scrabble score of 5.