Word.ws English Dictionary

tekan

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

Singapore[ˌtəˈkan]

tekan verb: to bully or treat harshly, to punish (especially in military contexts).

Verb

tekan (invariable)

  1. (Singapore, colloquial, invariable, slang) To bully or treat harshly, to punish (especially in military contexts).
    • "Wah lau! You tekan him, ah? But he bigger than you, man!"1992 February 22, soc.culture.asean (Usenet)
    • We have also been through training and we all kena tekan (were bullied), but even if we were ill-treated, we didn’t know that we were being ill-treated2003 October 17, “Questions thick and fast in Parliament”, in TODAY, page 2

Examples of tekan in a sentence

  • When Hamdan joined their cell, Iryan told him the 1.6m-tall victim was someone they could tekan (bully).2009 July 8, “Victim offered sex: Attackers”, in TODAY, page 10:
  • It will expose us to different ways of thought … like waking up at 4am and being tekan.2013 July 17, “Paige Chua wears the pants”, in TODAY, page 60:

Origin of tekan

From Malay tekan (“to press or pressure”).

Questions about tekan

What does tekan mean?
Tekan means to bully or treat harshly, to punish (especially in military contexts).
How do you use tekan in a sentence?
When Hamdan joined their cell, Iryan told him the 1.6m-tall victim was someone they could tekan (bully).
What part of speech is tekan?
Tekan is a verb.
How do you pronounce tekan?
Tekan is pronounced [ˌtəˈkan] (Singapore).

Words near tekan in the dictionary

  1. Tejutepeque
  2. Tejutla
  3. tek
  4. Teka
  5. Tekamah
  6. tekan
  7. Teke
  8. Teke-Tege
  9. Tekea
  10. tekeli pitha
  11. Tekes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tekan (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: “tekan.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tekan. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.