tetris

present singular third person tetrises · participle present tetrising · participle past tetrised · past tetrised

1. slangtransitiveTo arrange items in a constrained space.

   It will be hard to tetris all this furniture into the moving van.

1. video gamesA puzzle video game in which falling tetrominoes must be manipulated to form complete lines, which are then cleared from the grid.

   […]there were some other guys there who were into cosplay—that's costume play—and their thing was, they were dressed as Tetris blocks.

   2008, Daniel Radosh, Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture, page 213

   3 more examples

   There is one nice moment in the music, but it's not the moment identified by the owner of the system, and one idiot goes so far as to gush, "This is better than Tetris!"

   2001, Matt O'Keefe, You Think You Hear, page 25

   From the kitchen the guy said, "I write science fiction. Or I'm trying to write. I've been staring at that screen for three days. You just interrupted a one-hour Tetris marathon. I need to talk to a real human being."

   2007, David Skibbins, The Star: A Tarot Card Mystery, page 147

   Prior to this, DAS and Hypertapping were the two standards for Tetris pros, but Rolling allows for a high amount of button presses per second without the "superhuman finger speeds" needed for Hypertapping, modified controllers, or any gloves - which also makes it is perfectly legal for tournament play.

   2021 April 28, Adam Bankhurst, “NES Tetris Players Are Using a Special Technique Called Rolling to Set New World Records”, in IGN

2. figurativelyAn endeavor involving rearranging things of different shape into a physical space.

   Scheduling a meeting with ten people is a form of calendar Tetris.

   2018, Neil Soni, The Startup Gold Mine: How to Tap the Hidden Innovation Agendas of Large Companies to Fund and Grow Your Business, page 39

   4 more examples

   Then I looked at the furniture. It was all a bit unimaginative, so I rearranged everything at a jaunty angle. When I returned to the cellar I was still playing Tetris with the cooker in my head.

   2004, Clare Sudbery, The dying of delight

   While I worked out a Tetris-like arrangement to get all of the leftovers into the oven, Phil's curiosity got the better of him.

   2005, Jack Leonard, Bad Altitude

   When people spoke to me, the sounds of their words were Tetris shapes, falling. All I had to do was put each one in its bright, satisfying place.

   2005, Rachel DeWoskin, Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New China, page 134

   The tetris method does have some shortcomings, however. In placements produced by Feng Shui, the cells are closely packed.

   2007, David Chinnery, Kurt William Keutzer, Closing the Power Gap between ASIC & custom, page 234

plural Tetrises

1. broadlyvideo gamesThe act of clearing four lines at once (the maximum possible) in Tetris.

   Score two Tetrises in two drops playing Marathon.

   2007, Barbara Smith, Chad Yancey, Video Game Achievements and Unlockables

   3 more examples

   For some it's staying low on the play field, steadily advancing through the levels, for others its ^([sic]) trying to clear the board entirely or scoring an unprecedented number of tetrises.

   1990, Et cetera, Volumes 47-48

   See figure 3 for an example of a logical decision tree that indicates whether there is a possibility to score a tetris.

   1995, Kurt Driessens, “Relational Reinforcement Learning”, in Recent Trends in Data Type Specification, page 276

   Maximizing the number of tetrises (the number of times that four rows are cleared in a Tetris game) is NP-complete.

   2003, Tandy Warnow, Binhai Zhu, Computing and combinatorics: 9th annual international conference