Word.ws English Dictionary

tantalise

tantalise is the non-Oxford British English standard spelling of tantalize.

Meaning of tantalize

Verb

tantalize (third-person singular simple present tantalizes, present participle tantalizing, simple past and past participle tantalized)

  1. (transitive) To tease (someone) by offering or showing them something desirable but leaving them unsatisfied.
    • They could not bear to be tantalized nor tortured by the splendid delusion.1880, John Boyle O'Reilly, “The Land of the Red Line”, in Moondyne
    Synonyms:
    taunt
  2. (intransitive, obsolete) To be teased by something desirable that is kept out of reach.
    • The poore people in Corinth did ſee, and ſmell, vvhat the rich men taſted, Tantalizing all the vvhile, and having their penury doubled by the Antiperiſtaſis of others plenty[…]1640, Thomas Fuller, “A Comment on 1 Cor. II. 20. 21.”, in Ioseph’s Partie-coloured Coat: Containing, a Comment on Part of the II. Chapter of the I. Epistle of S. Paul to the Corinthians. […]...

Forms of tantalise

third-person singular presenttantalises
present participletantalising
past participletantalised
pasttantalised

Origin of tantalise

From Tantalus + -ise, see tantalize.

Questions about tantalise

What is tantalise the non-Oxford British English standard spelling of?
Tantalise is the non-Oxford British English standard spelling of tantalize.

Words near tantalise in the dictionary

  1. tantalic
  2. tantalic acid
  3. tantaliferous
  4. tantalisation
  5. tantalisations
  6. tantalise
  7. tantalised
  8. tantaliser
  9. tantalisers
  10. tantalises
  11. tantalising

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tantalise (page history and authors); tantalize (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “tantalise.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tantalise. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.