tweeze

Back-formation from tweezers.

• (US) IPA^(key): /twiz/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -iːz

tweeze (third-person singular simple present tweezes, present participle tweezing, simple past and past participle tweezed)

1. (transitive) To pluck or grasp using tweezers.
   • 1929 September 2, “Philatelists”, in Time:

     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.

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

     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.

2. (transitive) To shape by plucking out hairs with tweezers.
   • 1950, Anya Seton, chapter 1, in Foxfire‎, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, page 4:

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

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

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

3. (intransitive) To pluck out hairs using tweezers.
   • 2012 November 16, Adriana Ermter, “How to get the perfect eyebrows: Four reasons to enlist a professional”, in Chatelaine:

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