twiddle
Part of speech: verb
noun
Morphological type: compound
Topics: computing
engineering
mathematics
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
sciences
Etymology: Unknown. Perhaps a blend of twirl, twist, or twitch; fiddle.
Compound parts: twirl, twist, or twitch
fiddle
Inflected forms:
form: twiddles
pos: verb
tags: present
singular
third-person
form: twiddling
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
form: twiddled
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: twiddled
pos: verb
tags: past
form: twiddles
pos: noun
tags: plural
Senses:
gloss: To wiggle, fidget or play with; to move around.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: She sat and nervously twiddled her hair while she waited.
The harder Small sang, the harder the cow chewed and the faster she twiddled her ears around as if stirring the song into the food to be rechewed in cud along with her breakfast.
gloss: To flip or switch two adjacent bits (binary digits).
pos: verb
tags: transitive
gloss: To be in an equivalence relation with.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
gloss: To play with anything; hence, to be busy about trifles.
pos: verb
tags: intransitive
gloss: A slight twist with the fingers.
pos: noun
examples: He put away the receiver with a twiddle of pudgy fingers.
The hero, who must have been only a very few years older than Tom himself, gave a cursory nod and a twiddle of his fingers, then turned to his left to address Daniel Lysons who did not answer but caught Tom’s eye and raised his own eyebrow at this rudeness.
gloss: A wiggling movement.
pos: noun
examples: Why should I agree that a twiddle of skirts from right to left and pointing a toe in one direction mean “He loves me,” while the reverse twiddle and the toe pointed in the opposite direction “He loves me not”?
Instead, flagellar motion causes the bacterium to swim smoothly (called a run), then stop and tumble (a twiddle), followed by another period of smooth swimming
A raised white brow in my direction, and a twiddle of the pipe stem toward the trail indicated that his wife was at our house, if that's who I was looking for.
gloss: A small decorative embellishment.
pos: noun
examples: A great many fidgety occupations will come to an end: we shan’t put a pattern on a cloth or a twiddle on a jug-handle to sell it, but to make it prettier and to amuse ourselves and others.
Literally construed the Act would allow design right to be claimed in the design of an insignificant part—a mere ‘twiddle’, as it was put in argument.
That’s Mara’s usual line, you know—three curves and a twiddle, label it “Object,” and bob’s your uncle.
gloss: A small musical flourish.
pos: noun
examples: “Oh, auntie,” she exclaims, “these great Goths of Englishmen put a twiddle into the last bar of the ‘Minstrel Boy,’ just fancy that!”
That opening little flutter down the scale evokes an atmosphere when played by the flute; on the pianoforte it is a mere twiddle.
With a toot on the flute and a twiddle on the fiddle, O!
The band came in with a basic rock arrangement, Cropper’s triplets stamped by Jackson’s metronomic snare and cymbal, and Jenkins added neat little twiddle flourishes.
gloss: A tilde.
pos: noun
examples: For those places which feed input arcs leading to more than one transition, a “twiddle” symbol (e.g., ‘~’) may be used as the enabling predicate for one of the transitions.
The twiddle symbol indicates that a node has a particular distribution. For example, x ~ dbin(p,n) means that “x is distributed like the number of successes in n observations of a Bernoulli process.” Inadvertent use of an “=” sign instead of a twiddle or an arrow is one of the most common reasons for a compilation error message.
gloss: A drawn line that is curvy or twisted.
pos: noun
examples: It will then be seen that the inscriptions are very nearly alike, but an expert in Arabic or Vedic writing would recognize at once that they differ in more respects than in having a “twiddle too much or a twiddle too little.”
But D’s flourish was not generally a simple curl but a twiddle, as seen in the words of (35, 37, 70, 79, 94), sealf (85, 146) and yf (95, 142); this twiddle, which also appears in the Mistress Poem (p. 256), was however not an exclusive feature of f₁ but a striking personal habit, […]
Professional scribes (French, Burgundian, what you will) must sometimes have spoiled a copy – duplicated a word, misplaced a twiddle.
gloss: A tiny bit.
pos: noun
examples: Trying to tune in on your own face color is a bit like that: a twiddle too red, a twiddle too pale, and the whole image goes haywire.
But I don’t care a twiddle if I offend Danny DePuzo or not.
It should give you, somewhere, deep down a twiddle of respect.
gloss: A tizzy.
pos: noun
examples: Hey, diddle, diddle, we’re all in a twiddle, / Although we’re cuffed and we’re cuffed, / To be quite exact we cannot act, / For, you see, we are all of us stuffed.
Your mother’s going to have a twiddle fit if you dumped a perfectly good lord in the river.
In addition, nowhere in the article did I sense that anyone is angry at Serrano or blaming the school for lax security or getting their tighties in a twiddle about this or that.
Derived words: twiddle one's thumbs
twiddler
twiddlesome
twiddling line
twiddle muff
Translations: