twiddle

present singular third person twiddles · participle present twiddling · participle past twiddled · past twiddled

1. transitiveTo wiggle, fidget or play with; to move around.

   She sat and nervously twiddled her hair while she waited.

   1 more example

   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.

   1942, Emily Carr, “Singing”, in The Book of Small, Toronto, Ont.: Oxford University Press, →OCLC

2. transitivecomputingTo flip or switch two adjacent bits (binary digits).
3. transitivemathematicsTo be in an equivalence relation with.
4. intransitiveTo play with anything; hence, to be busy about trifles.

plural twiddles

1. A slight twist with the fingers.

   He put away the receiver with a twiddle of pudgy fingers.

   2011, Edgar Pangborn, A Mirror for Observers

   1 more example

   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.

   2018, Corille Fraser, A Coloured Canvas

2. A wiggling movement.

   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

   1998, James D. Mauseth, Botany: An Introduction to Plant Biology, page 522

   2 more 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”?

   1945, James Agate, A Shorter Ego, page 144

   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.

   2011, Diana Gabaldon, A Breath Of Snow And Ashes, page 223

3. A small decorative embellishment.

   That’s Mara’s usual line, you know—three curves and a twiddle, label it “Object,” and bob’s your uncle.

   2012, Nicholas Blake, Head of a Traveller, →ISBN

   2 more 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.

   1887, William Morris, The Society of the Future

   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.

   2004, Reports of Patent, Design, and Trade Mark Cases

4. A small musical flourish.

   With a toot on the flute and a twiddle on the fiddle, O!

   1939, The Nineteenth Century and After, volume CXXVI, page 76

   3 more examples

   “Oh, auntie,” she exclaims, “these great Goths of Englishmen put a twiddle into the last bar of the ‘Minstrel Boy,’ just fancy that!”

   1899, Truth, volume 46, page 366

   That opening little flutter down the scale evokes an atmosphere when played by the flute; on the pianoforte it is a mere twiddle.

   1925, The Musical Times and Singing-class Circular, page 59

   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.

   2015, Mark Ribowsky, Dreams to Remember

5. A tilde.

   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.

   1985, Yechiam Yemini, Robert Strom, Shaula Yemini, Protocol specification, testing, and verification, →ISBN

   1 more example

   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.

   2004, George G. Woodworth, Biostatistics: A Bayesian Introduction, →ISBN, page 316

6. A drawn line that is curvy or twisted.

   Professional scribes (French, Burgundian, what you will) must sometimes have spoiled a copy – duplicated a word, misplaced a twiddle.

   2012, Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Music At Long Verney, →ISBN

   2 more 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.”

   1895, Edward Jewitt Wheeler, Isaac Kaufman Funk, William Seaver Woods, The Literary Digest - Volume 10, page 198

   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, […]

   1952, Arthur Walsh Titherley, Shakespeare’s identity: William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby, page 275

7. A tiny bit.

   But I don’t care a twiddle if I offend Danny DePuzo or not.

   1987, Eve Bunting, Janet Hamm Needs a Date for the Dance, →ISBN, page 7

   2 more 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.

   1968, Mademoiselle: The Magazine for the Smart Young Woman

   It should give you, somewhere, deep down a twiddle of respect.

   2014, Norman Rose, Harold Nicolson, →ISBN, page cxxxvi

8. A tizzy.

   Your mother’s going to have a twiddle fit if you dumped a perfectly good lord in the river.

   1998, Judy Veisel, Flight of Fancy, page 19

   2 more 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.

   1938, Grade Teacher, volume 56, page 46

   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.

   2010, Matt Soper, Raising Up a Testimony, →ISBN, page 64