tweak

Tweak is both a verb and a noun with a base meaning of pinch, twist, or pull. From this, it has developed a number of other senses. The word, in the form twick, can be traced back to Old English. (The Oxford English Dictionary says this is only “perhaps,” but to my mind it is as certain as anything in this business.) We see this form in Bald’s Leechbook, a mid tenth-century medical text:

Wiþ ormætum hungre þonne scealt þu sona þæs mannes tilian: bind his ytmestan limo mid byndellum, teoh him þa loccas & wringe þa earan & þone wangbeard twiccige.

(For intense hunger, then you must soon treat the man, bind the ends of his limbs with bandages, pull from him the locks & wring the ears & twick the whiskers.)

Twick has been in use in various dialects through to the present day.

The form tweak appears at the beginning of the seventeenth century. We see it in a translation of Pliny’s Natural History:

These Spiders hunt also after the yong Lizards: first they enfold and wrap the head within their web: then, they catch hold and tweake both their lips together, and so bite and pinch them. A worthy sight and spectacle to behold, fit for a king, even from the stately Amphitheatres, when such a combat chanceth.

The translator, Philemon Holland, was known for using colloquial English in his translations of classical texts, so it seems likely that he was using a variant of the older twick. Holland's use of tweake here translates the Latin apprehendentes.

By the early eighteenth century, tweak had developed a figurative sense meaning to trouble, arouse, or spark. Nathan Bailey’s 1721 Universal Etymological English Dictionary records this sense:

A TWEAG, A TWEAK, [of Twaken, Teut.] Perplexity, Trouble.
To TWEAG  To TWEAK, [Twacken, Du. To pinch] to put into a fret.

And by the end of the nineteenth century in American speech tweak had also come to mean to bother, afflict, tease, make fun of. From Thomas Jerome’s 1895 novel Ku-Klux Klan No. 40:

“Oh, no; I did not mean to say that you should refrain from a prosecution for any reason,” answered Tinklepaugh. “I only thought to tease the Captain a little.”

And yet Tinklepaugh was tortured with a vague apprehension that an indictment of innocent persons for the murder of Old Stingy Jap might lead to the detection of the guilty slayers.

“Well I must confess that it does kinder stick a pin in my gizzard to tweak me about that little skirmish at the court-house,” answered Cross-eyed Telf; “but I’ll bet you next time I meet the Sheriff I’ll have my spurs on, and he won’t be allowed to snatch a bloodless victory, either.”

In the early twentieth century, cricketers started using tweak to refer to imparting spin on a ball. And a bowler who delivered tweaked balls was a tweaker. From the Times of London, 18 July 1935:

The score was 13 when Sims, a tweaker with possibilities, came on in place of Bowes, and Langridge was tried at the other end.

And in the latter half of the century, tweak was being used to mean to make small adjustments to something. From Omaha’s Sunday World-Herald Magazine of 20 April 1958 in an article about missile engineers:

“Otto,” somebody yelled, and out came Otto who marched up to the V-2, opened a small trap door, tweaked a gadget inside with a screwdriver, and the countdown proceeded. The V-2 worked like a charm.

This particular sense of tweak was especially common among automobile mechanics and could be found on both sides of the Atlantic. From London’s Sunday Telegraph of 14 July 1963:

After driving it for hundreds of miles I find its impressive record in rallies and races easy to understand. It is not a “hot rod” as you and I know the term, but a four-door, five-seat family saloon costing only £767—including tax—which has had its engine “tweaked” sufficiently at the factory to give a power-output of 78½ brake horse-power compared with 59½ in the ordinary £688 model.

And by the 1980s, tweak had become a slang term among drug, especially methamphetamine, users, also known as tweakers. The earliest drug-related use that I’m aware of is found in Ralph De Sola’s 1982 Crime Dictionary:

Tweak: (motorcycle-gang slang) inject heroin

Despite this early citation, use of tweak in relation to heroin is relatively rare.

(The OED has a 1981 citation of tweeked out under the drug definition, but the context has nothing to do with drugs, instead referring to the emotional state of a woman who had been raped, an extension of the bothered/afflicted sense.)

And we see tweak used in relation to methamphetamine by 1985. From Jennifer Blowdryer’s Modern English of that year:

TWEAK (v): When everybody is on speed, they are tweakin’ out on speed. One day turns into a week.

When we were living in the vats in San Francisco, everybody was always tweakin’, Animal was freakin’ out, me and Crystal had to get outta there. We took all these wires they were playin’ with, and made bracelets, and decided it would be anti-tweak, and we all took the fun bus, and we went to China Beach, and we had a big Barb que and everyone got drunk when they usually took speed and it was neat, it was  big anti-tweak campaign.

Sources:

Bailey, Nathan. An Universal Etymological English Dictionary. London: E. Bell, et al. 1721. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Blowdryer, Jennifer (Jennifer Waters). Modern English: A Trendy Slang Dictionary. Berkeley: Last Gasp, 1985, 81. Archive.org.

Cockayne, Oswald, ed. Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, vol. 2. London: Longman, et al., 1865, 2.16, 196. Archive.org.

“Cricket: Gentlemen v. Players.” Times (London), 18 July 1935, 6/1. Gale Primary Sources: Times Digital Archive.

De Sola, Ralph. Crime Dictionary. New York: Facts On File, 1982, 155. Archive.org.

Edwards, Courtenay. “Plenty of Spirit in Cortina G.T.” Sunday Telegraph (London), 14 July 1963, 20/2. Gale Primary Sources: Telegraph Historical Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 24 April 2025, s.v. tweak, n.2, tweak, v.2, tweaked, adj., tweaker, n.2, tweaking, adj., tweaky, adj.

Jerome, Thomas J. Ku-Klux Klan No. 40 A Novel. Raleigh, North Carolina: Edwards & Broughton, 1895, 205. Google Books.

Lutz, William W. “Typical of Missilemen Is . . . ‘Mr. Redstone.’” Sunday World-Herald Magazine (Omaha), 20 April 1958, 22-G/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Middle English Dictionary, 4 March 2025, s.v. twikken, v.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2022, s.v. tweak, v., tweak, n.1, tweaker, n.; June 2019, s.v. twick, v.

Pliny the Elder. The Historie of the World. Philemon Holland, trans. London: Impensis G.B., 1601, vol. 1, book 11, chap. 24, 324. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Photo credit: Giorgio Brida, 2009. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.