tilt

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. v. To cause to slope, as by raising one end; incline: tilt a soup bowl; tilt a chair backward.
2. v. To aim or thrust (a lance) in a joust.
3. v. To charge (an opponent); attack.
4. v. To forge with a tilt hammer.
5. v. To slope; incline. See Synonyms at slant.
6. v. To favor one side over another in a dispute; lean: "His views tilt unmistakably to the Arab position” ( William Safire).
7. v. To fight with lances; joust.
8. v. To engage in a combat or struggle; fight: tilting at injustices.
9. n. The act of tilting or the condition of being tilted.
10. n. An inclination from the horizontal or vertical; a slant: adjusting the tilt of a writing table.
11. n. A sloping surface, as of the ground.
12. n. A tendency to favor one side in a dispute: the court's tilt toward conservative rulings.
13. n. An implicit preference; a bias: "pitilessly illuminates the inaccuracies and tilts of the press” ( Nat Hentoff).
14. n. A medieval sport in which two mounted knights with lances charged together and attempted to unhorse one another.
15. n. A thrust or blow with a lance.
16. n. A combat, especially a verbal one; a debate.
17. n. A tilt hammer.
18. n. New England See seesaw. See Regional Note at teeter-totter.
19. idiom. at full tilt Informal At full speed: a tank moving at full tilt.
20. n. A canopy or an awning for a boat, wagon, or cart.
21. v. To cover (a vehicle) with a canopy or an awning.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. In seismology, to tip; incline from the vertical as the result of a movement of the earth's crust.
2. n. In seismology, that component of an earth-tremor which throws upright objects out of the vertical plane.
3. n. A see-saw; a plank tilting on a narrow support in the middle.
4. n. One of the small log-huts of the Labrador hunters. They are about 6 by 8 feet, have low ceilings, no windows, and a small hole for entrance and exit. They are built along a hunting path, and are situated about 10 miles apart.
5. To totter; tumble; fall; be overthrown.
6. To move unsteadily; toss.
7. To heel over; lean forward, back, or to one side; assume a sloping position or direction.
8. To charge with the lance; join in a tilting contest, or tilt; make rushing thrusts in or as in combat or the tourney; rush with poised weapon; fight; contend; rush.
9. To rush; charge; burst into a place.
10. To incline; cause to heel over; give a slope to; raise one end of: as, to tilt a barrel or cask in order to facilitate the emptying of it; to tilt a table.
11. To raise or hold poised in preparation for attack.
12. To attack with a lance or spear in the exercise called the tilt.
13. To hammer or forge with a tilt-hammer or tilt: as, to tilt steel to render it more ductile.
14. n. A sloping position; inclination forward, backward, or to one side: as, the tilt of a cask; to give a thing a tilt.
15. n. A thrust.
16. n. An exercise consisting in charging with the spear, sharp or blunted, whether against an antagonist or against a mark, such as the quintain. During the middle ages citizens tilted on horseback, and also in boats, which were moved rapidly against one another, so that the defeated tilter was thrown into the water.
17. n. plural The dregs of beer or ale; washings of beer-barrels.
18. n. A tilt-hammer.
19. n. A mechanical device for fishing through an opening in the ice. A simple tilt is a lath or narrow board with a hole bored through one end, through which a ronnd stick is run, both ends of the board resting on the sides of the hole in the ice. The line is attached to the short end of the lath, and when a fish is hooked his weight tips up the larger end, thus indicating that he is caught. An improved tilt consists of an upright with an arm over which the line passes down into the water. When a fish bites, the line is cast off, and the arm falls and automatically hoists a little flag on the upright as a signal. There are many other modifications of the same device. Also called tilter, tilt-up, and tip-up.
20. n. A pier, built of brush and stone, on which fishermen unload and dress their fish.
21. n. A covering of some thin and flexible stuff, as a tent-awning; especially, in modern use, the cloth cover of a wagon.
22. To furnish with an awning or tilt, as a wagon or a boat.
23. n. The North American stilt, Himantopus mexicanus. See cut under stilt.

Wiktionary

1. v. transitive to point or thrust a weapon at
2. v. to forge (something) with a tilt hammer
3. v. poker to play worse than usual (often as a result of previous bad luck)
4. v. photography to move a camera vertically in a controlled way
5. n. a slope or inclination (uncountable)
6. n. photography the controlled vertical movement of a camera, or a device to achieve this
7. n. an attempt at something, such as a tilt at public office.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. A covering overhead; especially, a tent.
2. n. The cloth covering of a cart or a wagon.
3. n. (Naut.) A cloth cover of a boat; a small canopy or awning extended over the sternsheets of a boat.
4. v. To cover with a tilt, or awning.
5. v. To incline; to tip; to raise one end of for discharging liquor.
6. v. To point or thrust, as a lance.
7. v. obsolete To point or thrust a weapon at.
8. v. To hammer or forge with a tilt hammer.
9. v. To run or ride, and thrust with a lance; to practice the military game or exercise of thrusting with a lance, as a combatant on horseback; to joust; also, figuratively, to engage in any combat or movement resembling that of horsemen tilting with lances.
10. v. To lean; to fall partly over; to tip.
11. n. A thrust, as with a lance.
12. n. A military exercise on horseback, in which the combatants attacked each other with lances; a tournament.
13. n. See Tilt hammer, in the Vocabulary.
14. n. Inclination forward.

WordNet 3.0

1. v. to incline or bend from a vertical position
2. n. a combat between two mounted knights tilting against each other with blunted lances
3. n. pitching dangerously to one side
4. n. a slight but noticeable partiality
5. v. move sideways or in an unsteady way
6. v. heel over
7. n. a contentious speech act; a dispute where there is strong disagreement
8. v. charge with a tilt
9. n. the property possessed by a line or surface that departs from the vertical