tweeze

present singular third person tweezes · participle present tweezing · participle past tweezed · past tweezed

1. transitiveTo pluck or grasp using tweezers.

   Stamp-men tweeze their treasures to avoid smudging, wear, tear; to hold them up to the light or pick them out of benzine baths in search of watermarks.

   1929 September 2, “Philatelists”, in Time

   1 more example

   He held his usual levee at his lodgings; he spent the usual hours washing and dressing; he rubbed his teeth with a red root, tweezed out hairs with a silver tweezer, tied his cravat to admiration, and issued at four precisely as perfectly equipped as if the Rue Royale had been St. James's Street and the Prince himself had hung upon his arm.

   1930, Virginia Woolf, “Beau Brummell”, in The Common Reader: Second Series, published 1932

2. transitiveTo shape by plucking out hairs with tweezers.

   He’d run his lacquered, dusky pink index finger over his tweezed mustache and say […]

   1988, Edmund White, chapter 3, in The Beautiful Room is Empty, New York: Vintage International, published 1994

   1 more example

   Here Mrs. Lawrence had smiled to soften the anxiety of her blue eyes under their frowning, carefully tweezed brows.

   1950, Anya Seton, chapter 1, in Foxfire, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, page 4

3. intransitiveTo pluck out hairs using tweezers.

   Word to the wise: if you must tweeze solo, stick to plucking only the obvious stray hairs.

   2012 November 16, Adriana Ermter, “How to get the perfect eyebrows: Four reasons to enlist a professional”, in Chatelaine