Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A habitual spasmodic muscular movement or contraction, usually of the face or extremities.
- intransitive verb To have a tic; produce tics.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A habitual spasmodic contraction of certain muscles, especially of the face; twitching; vellication: especially applied to tic-douloureux, or facial neuralgia. See
tic-douloureux . - noun An African beefeater or ox-pecker; an ox-bird. See cuts under
Buphaga and Textor.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Med.) 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 . - noun (Med.) Neuralgia in the face; face ague. See under
Face .
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A local and habitual convulsive motion of certain muscles.
- noun Shortened form of
ticket - verb intransitive To exhibit a tic; to undergo convulsive muscle movements.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a local and habitual twitching especially in the face
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word tic.
Examples
-
Calculations: Customer SLP tic$tic%originalSLPtic% tic* 16tic% = tic$tic%customerSLPtic%. ` n) tic: = Chr (96)
AutoHotkey Community 2010
-
Calculations: Customer SLP tic$tic%originalSLPtic% tic* 16tic% = tic$tic%customerSLPtic%. ` n) tic: = Chr (96)
AutoHotkey Community 2010
-
My personal tic is the overuse, as you mention, of adverbs and speech descriptors (ask, proposed, acknowledged – etc etc!)
-
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.
-
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.
2009 September « 2009
-
Mr. Carlin's most disturbing tic is a faux-intimate style.
McCartney Keeps the Biographers at Bay Carl Rollyson 2010
-
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 Asimov, Isaac 1963
-
Such a twitch is usually known as a tic (a word arising from the same root that "twitch" does, perhaps).
The Human Brain Asimov, Isaac 1963
-
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 2007
-
While habits are normal, a tic might be a symptom of a health problem.
You Raising Your Child Michael F. Roizen 2010
upatankar commented on the word tic
re: definition of "tic":
the meaning "persistent behavior trait" is missing from your explanations.
BTW, I just became a member, and am finding this app to be interesting and useful. Thx,
-upatankar.
May 28, 2013