(n.) A mender of brass kettles, pans, and other metal ware.
(n.) One skilled in a variety of small mechanical work.
(n.) A small mortar on the end of a staff.
(n.) A young mackerel about two years old.
(n.) The chub mackerel.
(n.) The silversides.
(n.) A skate.
(n.) The razor-billed auk.
(v. t.) To mend or solder, as metal wares; hence, more generally, to mend.
(v. i.) To busy one's self in mending old kettles, pans, etc.; to play the tinker; to be occupied with small mechanical works.
Example Sentences:
(1) For further education, this would be my priority: a substantial increase in funding and an end to tinkering with the form of qualifications and bland repetition of the “parity of esteem” trope.
(2) "We should be working out how it should be ended, rather than tinkering around the edges."
(3) The transport secretary, Philip Hammond, indicated that the government had no appetite for the kind of structural tinkering that broke up British Rail and rushed the system into private ownership in the 1990s.
(4) Tinker with the tax treatment of the elderly and prepare to be accused of imposing a "granny tax" .
(5) He also says that continual tinkering with pension rules by successive governments could deter people from investing in pensions.
(6) As the global financial crisis deepens, the rich nations will be forced to recognise that their problems cannot be solved by tinkering with a system that is constitutionally destined to fail.
(7) The pre-briefing we’re seeing, tinkering with schedules, now going on about pay, it’s very, very threatening to an institution that’s loved, [even one] that needs to reform.” Jeremy Hunt was the last culture minister to try to increase NAO oversight at the BBC, in 2010.
(8) Jean-Claude Juncker , the European commission president, told the Guardian in December that Cameron could tinker with British law on social security and migrant rights, but that enshrining discrimination in EU law was a no-go area.
(9) The tinkering with the tort system following the 1975 malpractice crisis will not ease the constantly increasing cost burden on the health care delivery system.
(10) At the very least, it would seem to be tinkering with the formula of the biggest spiritual brand in the world, analogous to Coca-Cola changing its famous recipe in 1985 .
(11) ET 10 min: Am I the only person who found Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy interminably dull?
(12) Happily, there are suddenly more alternatives, indies, blended play and new tech enabled hybrids, toys that encourage tinkering, making and individuality.
(13) This suggests that Labour’s answer to Ukip cannot be purely tactical or about tinkering with policy.
(14) The existence of multiple neuronal representations of sensory information and multiple circuits for the control of behavioral responses should provide the necessary freedom for evolutionary tinkering and the invention of new designs.
(15) Even after the Daily Mail's Jack Tinker (obituary, October 29 1996) contrived for Shulman's career as a theatre critic to be brought to an end in 1991, he continued to write a column for the Evening Standard on art affairs - until he was 83.
(16) The Tasmanian Liberal premier, Will Hodgman, opposed “tinkering” with the system.
(17) His personal favourite is probably his own 1926 vintage Bentley, and he admits to being in seventh heaven tinkering "to a fault" with any old engine he can get his hands on.
(18) I think a lot of the things they publish tinker on racism and Islamophobia … but at the same time I think they have a right to do what they do.
(19) But if these opportunities are squandered because tinkering at the edges seems safer than radical reform, we will have failed every future rape victim.
(20) The sounds he discovered on his guitar, refined during hours of solitary tinkering in his home studio, adorned records by Elvis Presley, Hank Williams and thousands of other artists, both country and pop.