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tuck

verbnounnounnouncommon in dialogue

  • Ireland//tʊk//
  • //tʌk//

To pull or gather up (an item of fabric).

verb

  1. 1

    To pull or gather up (an item of fabric).

  2. 2

    To push into a snug position; to place somewhere safe, or handy, or somewhat hidden.

    Tuck in your shirt. I tucked in the sheet. He tucked the $10 bill into his shirt pocket.

    She tucked her hair behind her ear.

    It was flood-tide along Fifth Avenue; motor, brougham, and victoria swept by on the glittering current; pretty women glanced out from limousine and tonneau; young men of his own type, silk-hatted, frock-coated, the crooks of their walking sticks tucked up under their left arms, passed on the Park side.

  3. 3

    To eat; to consume.

  4. 4

    To fit neatly.

    The sofa tucks nicely into that corner.

    Kenwood House is tucked into a corner of Hampstead Heath.

  5. 5

    To curl into a ball; to fold up and hold one's legs.

    The diver tucked, flipped, and opened up at the last moment.

  6. 6

    To sew folds; to make a tuck or tucks in.

    to tuck a dress

  7. 7

    To full, as cloth.

  8. 8

    Of a drag queen, trans woman, etc., to conceal one's penis and testicles, as with a gaff or by fastening them down with adhesive tape.

    Honey, have you tucked today? We don't wanna see anything nasty down there.

  9. 9

    To keep the thumb in position while moving the rest of the hand over it to continue playing piano keys that are outside the thumb (when playing scales).

  10. 10

    Variant of Mach tuckEllipsis of Mach tuck.

    Never take a first-generation Learjet past Mach 0.82; it'll tuck hard nose-down and you won't be able to pull out from the dive.

Etymology

From Middle English tuken, touken (“to torment, to stretch (cloth)”), from Old English tūcian (“to torment, vex”) and Middle Dutch tucken (“to tuck”), both from Proto-Germanic *teuh-, *teug- (“to draw, pull”) (compare also *tukkōną), from Proto-Indo-European *dewk- (“to pull”). Akin to Old High German zucchen (“to snatch, tug”), zuchôn (“to jerk”), German Low German tuken (“to tug, pluck, grab and pull towards”), Old English tēon (“to draw, pull, train”). Doublet of touch.

noun

  1. 1

    An act of tucking; a pleat or fold.

  2. 2

    A fold in fabric that has been stitched in place from end to end, as to reduce the overall dimension of the fabric piece.

  3. 3

    A curled position.

  4. 4

    A plastic surgery technique to remove excess skin.

    tummy tuck

  5. 5

    The act of keeping the thumb in position while moving the rest of the hand over it to continue playing keys that are outside the thumb.

  6. 6

    A curled position, with the shins held towards the body.

  7. 7

    The afterpart of a ship, immediately under the stern or counter, where the ends of the bottom planks are collected and terminate by the tuck-rail.

  8. 8

    datedFood, especially snack food.

    'What on earth do Coker and his parcel of tuck matter to us? You're not thinking of snooping his tuck, I suppose, like Bunter.'

noun

  1. 1

    archaicA rapier, a sword.

    […] with force he labour'd / To free's blade from retentive scabbard; / And after many a painful pluck, / From rusty durance he bail'd tuck […]

    [...] dismount thy tuck, be yare in thy preparation, for thy assailant is quick, skilful, and deadly. [...]

    He wore large hose,[…] and a tuck, as it was then called, or rapier, of tremendous length.

Etymology

From Old French estoc (“rapier”), from Italian stocco (“a truncheon, a short sword”). Doublet of estoc.

noun

  1. 1

    The beat of a drum.

Etymology

Compare tocsin.

Forms

plural
tucks
past tense
tucked
past participle
tucked
present participle
tucking
third person singular
tucks
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).