(v. t.) Especially, to pull with sudden force or effort, or to pull off or out from something, with a twitch; to twitch; also, to gather, to pick; as, to pluck feathers from a fowl; to pluck hair or wool from a skin; to pluck grapes.
(v. t.) To strip of, or as of, feathers; as, to pluck a fowl.
(v. t.) To reject at an examination for degrees.
(v. i.) To make a motion of pulling or twitching; -- usually with at; as, to pluck at one's gown.
(n.) The act of plucking, or the state of being plucked, at college. See Pluck, v. t., 4.
(v. t.) The lyrie.
Example Sentences:
(1) So Fifa left that group out and went ahead with the draw – according to legend, plucking names from the Jules Rimet trophy itself – and, after Belgium were chosen but decided not to participate, Wales came out next.
(2) The woman said it took her until the mid-1990s to pluck up the courage to report the abuse to Jersey's children's services department – and that her allegations were not taken seriously enough.
(3) Many of Long’s pieces are fragile and fleeting: a stripe of un-mown grass in an otherwise close cropped lawn at the Henry Moore foundation , a misty circle in Scotland that lasted only until the day warmed up, a stripe of green grass left by plucking daisies, or paintings in wet mud that dry out and crumble.
(4) They're partial to the odd eider duck and do lots of nifty fish-plucking from the waves.
(5) It described experiments in which skin cells plucked from mice were reprogrammed into what looked for all the world like embryonic stem cells.
(6) She said: "I have asked the migration advisory committee – and I am not going to pluck at figures from thin air – to look at these issues to see if we can get to a point where we can get a better assessment and a better judgment of the true picture, in relation to the costs or otherwise of the decisions that we are taking, because I do not believe that the impact assessment gives a full and true picture at the moment."
(7) Given how empty the sea is, it was a miracle that his distress signal, transmitted to the ever-watchful Falmouth Coastguard, was picked up by a Chinese supertanker whose crew plucked him from the water minutes before his boat sank.
(8) The various components of these muscles are provided with stiff as well as wide aponeuroses and tendons (much stronger than those observed in Columba), indicating forceful opening and closure of the beaks for plucking off the fruit, grasping it hard and manipulating it with the help of the beaks before swallowing.
(9) Usually but this time they're on their feet, plucking like workers in a chicken factory working on a bonus system for number of feathers plucked.
(10) Using the CRD, outer root sheath cells, isolated from plucked human hair follicles and plated on growth-arrested 3T3 feeder layers, were grown on native collagen lattices populated with living human fibroblasts.
(11) After this treatment, we plucked anagen hairs under standardized conditions both from the area treated with C and the contralateral, untreated area.
(12) The present study demonstrates the possibilities of DNA flow cytometry to study the pharmacological effects on cell kinetics of plucked human anagen hairs.
(13) I was much more comfortable with the data in Canada ( where he was governor before being plucked to run Threadneedle Street ), Carney replies .
(14) Dahl’s heroine, Sophie, is a lonely young girl plucked from her bed in an orphanage by the titular behemoth, and carried off to Giant Land, his home, lest she alert the normal world to the presence of giants.
(15) The number of carcasses which were positive after cooling was found to have decreased in poultry-processing plant B compared with the situation after plucking, whereas this number was not affected to any appreciable extent in processing plant A.
(16) Activities in both plucked and unplucked skin were higher in the animals fed diets with higher protein contents.
(17) counsels their mother, whose superb cheeriness and pluck are the things with which we truly built the empire), and seek out new friends and entertainments.
(18) Some boxing experts believe that, starting his career at light-middleweight against Hungary's Attila Molnar , Saunders will eventually emerge as the most successful of the trio Warren has plucked from the British Olympic team.
(19) Such organizations as Project Censored exist to call attention to, for instance, the "Top Censored Stories Corporate Media Won't Dare Touch" – pretty much all of which, of course, have been plucked from the corporate media.
(20) Rearing environment (enriched vs. normal) and method of vibrissae removal (cauterization of follicles vs. plucking) were examined to determine specific factors that m might influence the effect of vibrissae removal.
Tweak
Definition:
(v. t.) To pinch and pull with a sudden jerk and twist; to twitch; as, to tweak the nose.
(n.) A sharp pinch or jerk; a twist or twitch; as, a tweak of the nose.
(n.) Trouble; distress; tweag.
(n.) A prostitute.
Example Sentences:
(1) Bojan Krkic had been snuffed out in his central role for Stoke and Hughes’s tweaks would have paid off if Diouf’s finishing had been more incisive.
(2) Starting small, with oddly tweaked vocal samples and ominous-sounding piano, the first half is brilliantly brooding, to the point where the first chorus of “I love these streets but they weren’t meant for me to walk” arrives at the 45-second mark just as all the music drops away completely.
(3) That's likely to mean a tweak in set-up – most likely Vidal will play in more of an advanced role, with Silva adding extra ballast in behind him.
(4) Figures from the Halifax showing a 2.4% rise in prices in February could put pressure on the chancellor to announce tweaks to Help to Buy in next week's budget.
(5) And we will report back on how we are doing and we might have to tweak, but this is what we are aiming for."
(6) Once humans have gained "total mastery over morphological genetics", post-60,000 years from now, we'll be tweaking our children's DNA so that they're born with straight noses, regal lines and perfect facial symmetry.
(7) The Liverpool manager, Brendan Rodgers, secured Fabio Borini from Roma last week and is still hoping to tweak his squad before the new season, retaining interest in Fulham's Clint Dempsey and the Swansea City midfielder Joe Allen, and any money from Carroll's sale would bolster the funds at his disposal.
(8) "That essentially is just a group of people agreeing on tweaking things and making them a little bit different.
(9) The results are stunning and include precise measurements of the matter content of the universe and a tweak to the best estimate for its age.
(10) The Observer view on tax credit cuts | Observer editorial Read more “These are very significant changes and therefore I am sure the chancellor is keeping an open mind and will be looking to see whether any specific tweaks need to be made in the comprehensive spending review which takes place next month,” he said.
(11) It will need lots of tweaking to avoid annoying people – it's already being prodded to see whether it takes more or fewer clicks to reach the phone-dialer (more), and whether you can still set wallpaper (no, but your friends do with their picture – you may need to prune your friends).
(12) So let us tweak the question slightly and ask: what is the point of Jimmy Carr?
(13) The show's storylines were tweaked to take account of the new post-watershed slot.
(14) Osborne won limited support for "technical" tweaks to the draft legislation , although it appeared unlikely that Britain would make big gains in seeking to reverse the key points.
(15) The Department for Transport unveiled several tweaks to the first stage of the HS2 route to mollify opponents in the wealthy commuter belt north and west of London.
(16) To Geldof’s credit, he has said some of the lyrics will be tweaked slightly for this new version.
(17) She has been staying in the Y:Cube temporarily as a test to help the architects tweak the interior design.
(18) The engineers have put a brave face on the crash landings, tweaking navigation software, landing trajectories and other details based on each test.
(19) It may also offer tweaked devices to get around any injunction: "Samsung has already made some design changes to new products since the litigation first started more than a year ago," said Seo Won-seok, an analyst at Korea Investment & Securities.
(20) What they are prepared to do is tweak the existing doctrine," said Rebecca Johnson, the head of the Acronym Institute, a pro-disarmament pressure group.