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OneKitly

tic

nounverbnounattested in dialogue

  • Australia//tɪk//
  • New Zealand//tək//

A sudden, nonrhythmic motor movement or vocalization.

noun

  1. 1

    A sudden, nonrhythmic motor movement or vocalization.

    Tourette syndrome is a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by multiple tics. A tic is a sudden, rapid, repetitive, non-rhythmic movement (e.g. eye blinking) or vocalization (e.g. throat clearing).

  2. 2

    Something that is done or produced habitually or characteristically.

    Boyle revives some of the stylistic tics which found themselves being ripped off by geezer-gangster Britflicks back in the day, but now the freezeframes are briefer, sharper; the movie itself refers back to the original with variant flashback versions of famous scenes, but also Super 8-type images of the boys’ poignant boyhood in primary school.

Etymology

Borrowed from French tic.

verb

  1. 1

    To exhibit a tic; to undergo a sudden, semi-voluntary muscle movement.

    Patients often describe the need to tic as the mounting of inner tension, localized either to the body region where the tic is about to occur or throughout the body.

noun

  1. 1

    Variant of ticketinformalClipping of ticket.

Etymology

Clipping of ticket.

Forms

plural
tics
past tense
ticced
past participle
ticced
present participle
ticcing
third person singular
tics
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).