Definitions

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

  • noun A collar, a necklace, or an armband made of a strip of twisted metal, worn by the ancient Celts and Germans.
  • noun The measure of a force's tendency to produce torsion or rotation about an axis, equal to the product of the force vector and the radius vector from the axis of rotation to the point of application of the force; the moment of a force.
  • noun A turning or twisting force.
  • transitive verb To impart torque to.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A proposed unit for the measurement of the moment of forces; one dyne acting with a lever-arm of one centimeter. See unit of torque.
  • noun A twisted ornament forming a necklace or collar for the neck, particularly one worn by uncivilized people, and of such a make as to retain its rigidity and circular form. Such a collar was considered a characteristic attribute of the ancient Gauls. Also torques.
  • noun In mech., the moment of a system-force applied so as to twist anything, as a shaft in machinery.

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

  • noun A collar or neck chain, usually twisted, especially as worn by ancient barbaric nations, as the Gauls, Germans, and Britons.
  • noun (Mech.) That which tends to produce torsion; a couple of forces.
  • noun (Phys. Science) A turning or twisting; tendency to turn, or cause to turn, about an axis.

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

  • noun A tightly braided necklace or collar, often made of metal, worn by various early European peoples.
  • noun physics, mechanics A rotational or twisting effect of a force; a moment of force, defined for measurement purposes as an equivalent straight line force multiplied by the distance from the axis of rotation (SI unit newton-metre or Nm; imperial unit foot-pound or ft.lbf).
  • verb To twist or turn something.

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

  • noun a twisting force

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[French, from Old French, from Latin torquēs, from torquēre, to twist; see terkw- in Indo-European roots.]

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[From Latin torquēre, to twist; see terkw- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin torqueō.

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Examples

Comments

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  • torque, v. to offend, to arouse anger.

    Ex.: Police say that between four counties, Jack McPeak stole flags from fire departments, schools, cemeteries, “and the one that really torques me off,” said Keith County Sheriff Jeff Stevens, “the American Legion.”

    https://www.facebook.com/NPTelegraph/posts/1350267468330821

    Google "really torques me" to find many such examples. Kitit, in comments at tork, reports that this expression was common when he was a teenager in the 1960s. I am about the same age as Kitit and I do not recall hearing this expression while growing up in New England. It may be a regionalism.

    August 7, 2017

  • There were a couple of examples over on torked.

    August 7, 2017