twist

PIE word
*dwóh₁

From Middle English twist, from Old English *twist, in compounds (e.g. mæsttwist (“a rope; stay”), candeltwist (“a wick”)), from Proto-Germanic *twistaz, a derivative of *twi- (“two-”) (compare also twine, between, betwixt).

Related to Saterland Frisian Twist (“discord”), Dutch twist (“twist; strife; discord”), German Low German Twist (“strife; discord”), German Zwist (“turmoil; strife; discord”), Swedish tvist (“quarrel; dispute”), Icelandic tvistur (“deuce”).

The verb is from Middle English twisten. Compare Dutch twisten, Danish tviste (“to dispute”), Swedish tvista (“to argue; dispute”).

• enPR: twĭst, IPA^(key): /twɪst/, [tw̥ɪst]

• Audio (US):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɪst

twist (countable and uncountable, plural twists)

1. A twisting force.
2. Anything twisted, or the act of twisting.
   • 1906, Edith Nesbit, chapter 8, in The Railway Children:

     Peter was always proud afterwards when he remembered that, with the Bargee's furious fingers tightening on his ear, the Bargee's crimson countenance close to his own, the Bargee's hot breath on his neck, he had the courage to speak the truth.
     "I wasn't catching fish," said Peter.
     "That's not your fault, I'll be bound," said the man, giving Peter's ear a twist—not a hard one—but still a twist.

   • 1711 July 29 (Gregorian calendar), [Joseph Addison; Richard Steele et al.], “WEDNESDAY, July 18, 1711”, in The Spectator, number 120; republished in Alexander Chalmers, editor, The Spectator; a New Edition, […], volume II, New York, N.Y.: D[aniel] Appleton & Company, 1853, →OCLC:

     Not the least turn or twist in the fibres of any one animal which does not render them more proper for that particular animal's way of life than any other cast or texture.

     The spelling has been modernized.

3. The form given in twisting.
   • 1712, Humphry Polesworth [pseudonym; John Arbuthnot], “How Jack Hang’d Himself Up by the Perswasion of His Friends, who Broke Their Word, and Left His Neck in the Noose”, in An Appendix to John Bull Still in His Senses: Or, Law is a Bottomless-Pit. […], 2nd edition, London: […] John Morphew, […], →OCLC, page 16:

     Habakkuk brought him a ſmooth, ſtrong, tough Rope, made of many a ply of vvholeſome Scandinavian Hemp, compactly tvviſted together, vvith a Nooſe that ſlip'd as glib as a Bird-catcher's Gin. Jack ſhrunk and grevv pale at firſt ſight of it, he handled it, meaſur'd it, ſtretch'd it, fix'd it againſt the Iron-bar of the VVindovv to try its ſtrength, but not Familiarity could reconcile him to it. He found fault vvith the length, the thickneſs, and the tvviſt, nay, the very colour did not pleaſe him.

4. The degree of stress or strain when twisted.
5. A type of thread made from two filaments twisted together.
   • 1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book IV, Canto II”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC:

     the thrid
     By griesly Lachesis was spun with paine,
     That cruell Atropos eftsoones vndid,
     With cursed knife cutting the twist in twaine […]

   • 1808–1810, William Hickey, Memoirs of a Georgian Rake, Folio Society 1995, page 140:

     I was one morning walking arm in arm with him in St James's Park, his dress then being […] waistcoat and breeches of the same blue satin, trimmed with silver twist à la hussarde, and ermine edges.

6. A sliver of lemon peel added to a cocktail, etc.
   • 2005, Theodore J. Albasini, The Progeny:

     Bunny sat on the only remaining stool at the leather-padded oval bar in the Iron Lounge. It was happy hour, two drinks for the price of one. She decided on a martini with a twist, and while the bartender was preparing her drink, she scanned the faces looking at the bar.

7. A sudden bend (or short series of bends) in a road, path, etc.
   • 1899, Edith Nesbit, The Wouldbegoods:

     But here a twist in the stream brought us out from the bushes

   • 1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter I, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y., London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC:

     I stumbled along through the young pines and huckleberry bushes. Pretty soon I struck into a sort of path that, I cal'lated, might lead to the road I was hunting for. It twisted and turned, and, the first thing I knew, made a sudden bend around a bunch of bayberry scrub and opened out into a big clear space like a lawn.

8. A distortion to the meaning of a passage or word.
9. An unexpected turn in a story, tale, etc.
   • 1987 October 23, Caryn James, “Movie Review: No Man's Land (1987)”, in New York Times:

     Though set in Los Angeles, the film has a familiar, television look and feel - two handsome partners, cops, criminals, fast cars and a marginal romance. The twist in the buddy-car-chase formula is that here the good guys tend to blur into the bad.

   • 2007 September 7, Graham Linehan, The IT Crowd, Season 2, Episode 3:

     Roy: Oh no, now I know there's a twist. I'm gonna spend the whole film guessing what it is. Damn you, Dominator!
     Moss: Just try and forget that there's a twist.
     Roy: Oh, how can you forget there's a twist?...
     Douglas: Oh, I've heard of this flick. There's a twist in it, isn't there?... I bet he's a woman, that bloke. No, you think it's the future, but it's actually set in the past. It's not Earth. It's all a dream!... They're all clones. He's his own brother. Everyone's a ghost.

   • 2012 May 24, Nathan Rabin, “Film: Reviews: Men In Black 3”, in The A.V. Club:

     In the abstract, Stuhlbarg’s twinkly-eyed sidekick suggests Joe Pesci in Lethal Weapon 2 by way of late-period Robin Williams with an alien twist, but Stuhlbarg makes a character that easily could have come across as precious into a surprisingly palatable, even charming man.

10. (preceded by definite article) A modern dance popular in Western culture in the late 1950s and 1960s, based on rotating the hips repeatedly from side to side. See Twist (dance) on Wikipedia for more details.
    • 1958, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters (lyrics and music), “The Twist”:

      Come on, baby, let's do the twist
      Take me by my little hand and go like this

    • 1962, “Monster Mash”, Bobby "Boris" Pickett and Lenny Capizzi (lyrics), performed by Bobby (Boris) Pickett and The Crypt-Kickers:

      Out from his coffin, Drac's voice did ring
      Seems he was troubled by just one thing
      Opened the lid and shook his fist
      And said, "Whatever happened to my Transylvania twist?"
      It's now the Mash
      It's now the Monster Mash.

    • 1997 April 22, Jennifer Dunning, “Surviving It All, Dismissals, Tours and Balanchine”, in New York Times:

      She taught him to do the twist, having learned it herself from an Alvin Ailey dancer at Jacob's Pillow.

11. A rotation of the body when diving.
12. A sprain, especially to the ankle.
13. (obsolete) A twig.
    • 1600, [Torquato Tasso], “The Thirteenth Booke of Godfrey of Bulloigne”, in Edward Fairefax [i.e., Edward Fairfax], transl., Godfrey of Bulloigne, or The Recouerie of Ierusalem. […], London: […] Ar[nold] Hatfield, for I[saac] Iaggard and M[atthew] Lownes, →OCLC, stanza 5, page 235:

      No twiſt, no twig, no bough nor branch […]

14. (slang) A girl, a woman.
    • 1935, Horace McCoy, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Serpent’s Tail, published 2011, →ISBN, page 19:

      James and Ruby danced over beside us. ‘Did you tell her?’ he asked, looking at me. I nodded.
      ‘Wait a minute,’ Gloria said, as they started to dance away. ‘What’s the big idea of talking behind my back?’
      ‘Tell that twist to lay off me,’ James said, still speaking directly to me.

    • 1990, Miller's Crossing, 01:08:20

      (Dane, speaking about a woman character) "I'll see where the twist flops"

15. A roll or baton of baked dough or pastry in a twisted shape.
16. (countable, uncountable) A small roll of tobacco.
    • 1945 January and February, A Former Pupil, “Some Memories of Crewe Works—III”, in Railway Magazine, page 14:

      We spent a lot of time up on the staging of the great furnaces, trying to pick up the tricks of the trade from the taciturn furnacemen who sat around placidly smoking, or chewing twist, and occasionally throwing in more pig iron to the molten white-hot metal.

    • 1953, Samuel Beckett, Watt, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Grove Press, published 1959, →OCLC:

      […] this Katie Byrne was a great favourite with Art and Con, to whom she always brought a gift of tobacco twist, when she came on a visit, and Art and Con were great chewers of tobacco twist, and never had enough, never never had enough tobacco twist, for their liking.

17. A material for gun barrels, consisting of iron and steel twisted and welded together.

    Damascus twist

18. The spiral course of the rifling of a gun barrel or a cannon.
19. (obsolete, slang) A beverage made of brandy and gin.
20. A strong individual tendency or bent; inclination.

    a twist toward fanaticism

21. (slang, archaic) An appetite for food.
    • 1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter XXXV, in The History of Pendennis. […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1849–1850, →OCLC:

      Hope you’ve brought good appetites with you, gentlemen. You, Doolan, I know ave, for you’ve always ad a deuce of a twist.

    • 1861, The Farmer's Magazine, page 40:

      He [the yearling bull] had a good handsome male head, and he had a capital twist. He had a spring in his rib, and was something over seven feet in girth. He was well covered, and had all the recommendations of quality, symmetry, and size.

22. Short for hair twist.
    • 2021, Becky S. Li, Howard I. Maibach, Ethnic Skin and Hair and Other Cultural Considerations, page 154:

      The physician should evaluate for a history of tight ponytails, buns, chignons, braids, twists, weaves, cornrows, dreadlocks, sisterlocks, and hair wefts in addition to the usage of religious hair coverings.

• German: Twist

twist (third-person singular simple present twists, present participle twisting, simple past and past participle twisted)

1. To turn the ends of something, usually thread, rope etc., in opposite directions, often using force.
2. To join together by twining one part around another.
   • 1900 May 17, L[yman] Frank Baum, chapter 15, in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Chicago, Ill., New York, N.Y.: Geo[rge] M[elvin] Hill Co., →OCLC:

     "Well, one day I went up in a balloon and the ropes got twisted, so that I couldn't come down again. It went way up above the clouds, so far that a current of air struck it and carried it many, many miles away. For a day and a night I traveled through the air, and on the morning of the second day I awoke and found the balloon floating over a strange and beautiful country."

3. To contort; to writhe; to complicate; to crook spirally; to convolve.
   • June 8, 1714, Alexander Pope, letter to Jonathan Swift

     twisting it into a serpentine form.

4. To wreathe; to wind; to encircle; to unite by intertexture of parts.
   • 1645, Edmund Waller, To my Lord of Falkland:

     longing to twist bays with that ivy

   • 1844, Robert Chambers, “Dr Thomas Burnet”, in Cyclopædia of English Literature:

     There are pillars of smoke twisted about wreaths of flame.

5. (reflexive) To wind into; to insinuate.

   Avarice twists itself into all human concerns.

6. To turn a knob etc.
7. To distort or change the truth or meaning of words when repeating.
   • 1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis. […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1849–1850, →OCLC:

     Say I could succeed at the Bar, and achieve a fortune by bullying witnesses and twisting evidence; is that a fame which would satisfy my longings, or a calling in which my life would be well spent?

8. To form a twist (in any of the above noun meanings).
9. To injure (a body part) by bending it in the wrong direction.
   • 1901, Henry Lawson, Joe Wilson's Courtship:

     Then Romany went down, then we fell together, and the chaps separated us. I got another knock-down blow in, and was beginning to enjoy the novelty of it, when Romany staggered and limped.
     ‘I’ve done,’ he said. ‘I’ve twisted my ankle.’ He’d caught his heel against a tuft of grass.

   • 1912 (date written), [George] Bernard Shaw, “Pygmalion”, in Androcles and the Lion, Overruled, Pygmalion, London: Constable and Company, published 1916, →OCLC, Act V, page 185:

     Oh, you are a devil. You can twist the heart in a girl as easy as some could twist her arms to hurt her. Mrs Pearce warned me. Time and again she has wanted to leave you; and you always got round her at the last minute. And you dont care a bit for her. And you dont care a bit for me.

10. (intransitive, of a path) To wind; to follow a bendy or wavy course; to have many bends.
    • 1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter I, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y., London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC:

      I stumbled along through the young pines and huckleberry bushes. Pretty soon I struck into a sort of path that, I cal'lated, might lead to the road I was hunting for. It twisted and turned, and, the first thing I knew, made a sudden bend around a bunch of bayberry scrub and opened out into a big clear space like a lawn.

    • 1926, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, He:

      My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyze, and annihilate me.

11. (transitive) To cause to rotate.
    • 1911, John Masefield, chapter 8, in Jim Davis:

      The tide seized us and swept us along, and in the races where this happened there were sucking whirlpools, strong enough to twist us round.

12. (intransitive) To dance the twist (a type of dance characterised by twisting one's hips).
13. (transitive) To coax.
    • 1932, Robert E. Howard, Dark Shanghai:

      "On the three-thousand-dollar reward John Bain is offerin' for the return of his sister," said Ace. "Now listen--I know a certain big Chinee had her kidnapped outa her 'rickshaw out at the edge of the city one evenin'. He's been keepin' her prisoner in his house, waitin' a chance to send her up-country to some bandit friends of his'n; then they'll be in position to twist a big ransome outa John Bain, see? [...]"

14. (card games) In the game of blackjack (pontoon or twenty-one), to be dealt another card.

(antonym(s) of “in blackjack, be dealt another card”):: stick; stay

• twits, witts

Borrowed from English twist.

twist m inan

1. twist (dance)

• “twist”, in Kartotéka Novočeského lexikálního archivu (in Czech)
• “twist”, in Slovník spisovného jazyka českého (in Czech), 1960–1971, 1989

• IPA^(key): /tʋɪst/

• Audio:

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɪst

From Proto-Germanic *twistaz (“strife, quarrel”). Cognate with Saterland Frisian Twist (“discord”), German Low German Twist (“strife; discord”), German Zwist (“turmoil; strife; discord”), Swedish tvist (“quarrel; dispute”), Icelandic tvistur (“deuce”), and English twist.

twist m (uncountable, diminutive twistje n)

1. strife, discord
2. dispute

• redetwisten
• twistappel

From English twist.

twist m (uncountable, diminutive twistje n)

1. twist: dance, turn

• witst

From English twist.

• IPA^(key): /ˈtwist/, [ˈt̪wis̠t]
• IPA^(key): /ˈtʋist/, [ˈt̪ʋis̠t]
• Rhymes: -ist
• Hyphenation^(key): twist

twist

1. twist (dance)

• “twist”, in Kielitoimiston sanakirja [Dictionary of Contemporary Finnish]‎^[1] (in Finnish) (online dictionary, continuously updated), Kotimaisten kielten keskuksen verkkojulkaisuja 35, Helsinki: Kotimaisten kielten tutkimuskeskus (Institute for the Languages of Finland), 2004–, retrieved 2023-07-03

Borrowed from English twist.

• IPA^(key): /twist/

• Audio:

  (file)

twist m (plural twists)

1. twist (dance)

• twister

• “twist”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.

• twest, tweste, twiste, twyst, twyste

From Old English *twist (attested in compounds), from Proto-West Germanic *twist, from Proto-Germanic *twistaz.

• IPA^(key): /twist/

twist (plural twistes)

1. The flat part of a hinge (less specifically the entire hinge)
2. A twig or branch.
   • c. 1380s, [Geoffrey Chaucer, William Caxton, editor], The Double Sorow of Troylus to Telle Kyng Pryamus Sone of Troye [...] [Troilus and Criseyde], [Westminster]: Explicit per Caxton, published 1482, →OCLC; republished in [William Thynne], editor, The Workes of Geffray Chaucer Newlye Printed, […], book III, [London]: […] [Richard Grafton for] Iohn Reynes […], 1542, →OCLC, line 1181:

     As a-bowte a tre with many a twyste
     Bytrent and wryþe the soote wode bynde.

     As about a tree with many a twig
     Entwines and writhes the sweet woodbine.

3. A groin (juncture between the chest and thighs)

• twisten

• English: twist
• Scots: twist

• “twist, n.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007.

Unadapted borrowing from English twist.

• IPA^(key): /ˈtwist/

• Audio:

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ist
• Syllabification: twist

twist m animal

1. twist (type of dance)
2. (music) twist (music to this dance)
3. twist (beverage made of brandy and gin)
4. jar with a threaded neck and a screw cap allowing airtight sealing
5. screw cap for this type of jar

• twist in Polish dictionaries at PWN

Unadapted borrowing from English twist.

twist m (uncountable)

1. twist (type of dance)

Unadapted borrowing from English twist or French twist.

twist n (plural twisturi)

1. twist (dance)

Unadapted borrowing from English twist.

• IPA^(key): /ˈtwist/ [ˈt̪wist̪]
• Rhymes: -ist

twist m (plural twists)

1. twist (clarification of this definition is needed)

According to Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) prescriptions, unadapted foreign words should be written in italics in a text printed in roman type, and vice versa, and in quotation marks in a manuscript text or when italics are not available. In practice, this RAE prescription is not always followed.

• “twist”, in Diccionario de la lengua española [Dictionary of the Spanish Language] (in Spanish), online version 23.7, Royal Spanish Academy [Spanish: Real Academia Española], 2023 November 28