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Meaning of teaser in English:

teaser

Pronunciation /ˈtiːzə/

Translate teaser into Spanish

noun

  • 1A person who makes fun of or provokes others in a playful or unkind way.

    ‘In an odd way, both the teasers and supporters appear to help youths keep pledges.’
    • ‘Geraldo Rivera is a war correspondent, or so the teasers on Fox News tell us.’
    • ‘Calling her son after a cheesy Abba song can only have created the need for him to prove he was not the nancy boy that the less open-minded - and there are plenty of playground teasers in that bracket - might have assumed from his moniker.’
    • ‘Later a man who was sitting at the bar sent me over a glass of sparkling white wine with his phone number, and in front of all the people I worked with, many of them terrible teasers, it was majorly hard to live down.’
    • ‘Actually, everyone agrees that Thom is the worst teaser, like a big brother who revels in picking on everyone else.’
    • ‘It sounds like a tease and I told you I don't like teasers.’
    • ‘Verbal bullying isn't teasing - teasing happens when both the teaser and child are having fun.’
    • ‘Give your child the tools to confront his teasers by asking your child what he'd like to say and then practicing those statements with him.’
    • ‘Then because of you and your practical joke I went from being the teaser to the teasee.’
    • ‘target: not reached’
    1. 1.1A person who tempts someone sexually with no intention of satisfying the desire aroused.
      • ‘He was the teaser of them all, and was a huge flirt.’
    2. 1.2An inferior stallion or ram used to excite mares or ewes before they are served by the stud animal.
      ‘In this context the Department has urged breeders - thoroughbred and non-thoroughbred alike - to test and vaccinate stallions and teasers to be used during 2004 breeding season.’
      • ‘The other two horses - a teaser and a retired lead pony - were both owned by Ford.’
    3. 1.3Fishing A lure or bait trailed behind a boat to attract fish.
      ‘the fish followed the teaser to within thirty feet of the boat’
      • ‘I am about to make a turn back, the two of us still looking for further splashes when without warning the short bait, riding behind the Big Herbie teaser, is smacked hard and instantly we are into a fish.’
      • ‘I saw the fish clearly then, bill out of the water, the fish acting like a sailfish at a teaser.’
      • ‘The boat seemed almost to be floating on nothing: suspended, as it were, sixty feet above the brilliant corals, as we trolled our teasers, about half a mile offshore.’
      • ‘Controlled panic, teasers in, mike on, lures flying across the water.’
      • ‘They also have a large teaser lure, usually a big skirted lure without a hook placed about 20-yards behind the boat.’
      lure, decoy, fly, troll, jig, plug, teaser

  • 2A short introductory advertisement for a product that stimulates interest by remaining cryptic.

    ‘promotional teasers in every commercial break’
    • ‘J K Rowling has been particularly secretive about the plot, but she has released a couple of short extracts as a teaser.’
    • ‘There's two trailers, a short teaser and a longer full trailer, both available in Dolby Digital 5.1 and anamorphic widescreen.’
    • ‘Also, the previews showed a teaser for a movie called ‘Goodbye Lenin’ that looks interesting as well - it's about a German woman who wakes up from a coma.’
    • ‘But the teaser - featuring footage of Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Christopher Lee, new Anakin Hayden Christensen and Jimmy Smits - turned out to be a hoax.’
    • ‘‘The Greatest Issue… Of All Time’ is a teaser on the cover.’
    • ‘Then came a teaser for Monday's programme: ‘A new season of Oprah!’’
    • ‘The teaser sets up the format of the episode, it can take one of three choices.’
    • ‘The article - I'm looking at the paper NYT - features a lot of pictures of young women with their tongues out, but the teaser on the front page is that picture of Albert Einstein with his tongue out.’
    • ‘Just heard on a Fox teaser: ‘Tonight at nine: the FBI grills Berger!’’
    • ‘Especially with the teasers being shown on the BBC and all these theories going round.’
    • ‘Then why play it up and publicise it and use teasers and wordy websites to give background info?’
    • ‘The Daily Mirror has a Wicked Whispers section, where tantalising titbits of news are disseminated in teasers.’
    • ‘I'll be posting my panel schedule in a few days but here are a few more teasers.’
    • ‘The unnecessarily large teasers and the masthead monopolise more than half of the visible area.’
    • ‘The size of headlines, the length of teasers and the use of RSS feeds complete the uniform-to-be look.’
    • ‘And if the teasers being run before Return of the King are any indicator, the movie has some real vision to offer.’
    • ‘Ten-second teasers of the book-films will be sent out by e-mail before the full versions are shown on television and in cinemas across the UK.’
    • ‘Commercial business cards or advertisements of pornographic images placed in the Usenet as teasers to increase the number of consumers, and anonymously posted non - commercial images are both distributed through the Usenet.’
    • ‘A picture-in-picture function can link the impulse buy teasers on network channels to the dedicated shopping channel, allowing customers to find more information on products even as they continue to watch the show.’
    • ‘Normally readers would have at least two stories, sometimes three, as well as two to three teasers or pointers (usually across the top of the page under the masthead) to scan and select their reading matter.’

  • 3informal A tricky question or task.

    • ‘the teams get the chance to pose the opposition some teasers’
    • ‘He said: ‘Laurie is amazing for her age, she does crosswords, puzzles, teasers and she plays Scrabble.’’
    • ‘They certainly can Jonnie, and our mail bag is bulging following your tricky teaser.’
    • ‘Ballmer was asked the classic teaser question: what he would have done differently.’
    • ‘If one room of Residency Towers, found MBA students puzzling over such teasers in the preliminary round of the business quiz, the other rooms had students caught in the throes of management games on Thursday.’
    • ‘You know how we are always getting puzzles and teasers from our listeners.’
    • ‘The students will see slides of the brain at work, and with games, puzzles, and teasers will learn how they can exercise their brains while having fun.’
    • ‘A sample of 100 Irish fans were given rugby-themed teasers on logic, verbal ability, general reasoning, visual-spatial ability and numbers.’
    • ‘There were baffling, unanswerable teasers such as: why is a left foot either ‘trusty’ or ‘educated’ but a right foot is neither?’
    • ‘I knew it was one of those mathematical teasers that my brother would love, so printed it off to show him during my nieces' birthday party over the weekend.’
    • ‘If you want the answers to these teasers, specific ones in the quiz that you're stuck on or indeed the whole quiz itself (!) let me know.’
    • ‘So well done all, I might do another one of those teasers in the future as there are loads of generic tube scenes featured in ads and it would be interesting to locate them exactly!’
    • ‘This site aims to bring the magic of words into everyone's life with articles, anagrams, simple teasers and ‘a word a day’.’
    • ‘So just to get you into the school mode, my good friend Graham White from Galway sent me a couple of teasers to kick the grey matter into action again.’
    • ‘If you're in the market for a role-playing game full of mind-bending teasers and intriguing twists, look elsewhere.’
    • ‘Can you solve 15 teasers in this new style exhibition suitable for the whole family?’
    • ‘But there is one diagnostic teaser you can use to try and sort this out for this particular situation.’
    • ‘For those of you who are already too smart for your own good, we've tossed in a couple of teasers that will bring you down to our level.’
    • ‘We're not sure, Jonathan, but seeing as you've almost certainly answered one of our ground teasers, we'll include it anyway.’
    • ‘Rob Eastaway is a mathematician who used to set the teasers for New Scientist magazine.’
    mystery, puzzle, riddle, conundrum, paradox, problem, unsolved problem, question, question mark, quandary, a closed book