tetris
/ˈtɛtɹɪs/
tetris verb: to arrange items in a constrained space.
Verb
tetris (third-person singular simple present tetrises, present participle tetrising, simple past and past participle tetrised)
- To arrange items in a constrained space.
- It will be hard to tetris all this furniture into the moving van.
Proper noun capitalized: Tetris
Tetris
- A puzzle video game in which falling tetrominoes must be manipulated to form complete lines, which are then cleared from the grid.
- There is one nice moment in the music, but it's not the moment identified by the owner of the system, and one idiot goes so far as to gush, "This is better than Tetris!"2001, Matt O'Keefe, You Think You Hear, page 25
- From the kitchen the guy said, "I write science fiction. Or I'm trying to write. I've been staring at that screen for three days. You just interrupted a one-hour Tetris marathon. I need to talk to a real human being."2007, David Skibbins, The Star: A Tarot Card Mystery, page 147
- An endeavor involving rearranging things of different shape into a physical space.
- Then I looked at the furniture. It was all a bit unimaginative, so I rearranged everything at a jaunty angle. When I returned to the cellar I was still playing Tetris with the cooker in my head.2004, Clare Sudbery, The dying of delight
- While I worked out a Tetris-like arrangement to get all of the leftovers into the oven, Phil's curiosity got the better of him.2005, Jack Leonard, Bad Altitude
Noun capitalized: Tetris
Tetris (plural Tetrises)
- The act of clearing four lines at once (the maximum possible) in Tetris.
- For some it's staying low on the play field, steadily advancing through the levels, for others its ^([sic]) trying to clear the board entirely or scoring an unprecedented number of tetrises.1990, Et cetera, Volumes 47-48
- See figure 3 for an example of a logical decision tree that indicates whether there is a possibility to score a tetris.1995, Kurt Driessens, “Relational Reinforcement Learning”, in Recent Trends in Data Type Specification, page 276
Forms of tetris
| Verb | |
|---|---|
| third-person singular present | tetrises |
| present participle | tetrising |
| past participle | tetrised |
| past | tetrised |
| Noun | |
| plural | Tetrises |
Origin of tetris
From Tetris.
From Russian Те́трис (Tétris), coined by the creator of the game, Alexey Pajitnov, from the Russian numerical prefix тетра- (tetra-, “tetra-”) (as all of the game's pieces contain four segments) and те́ннис (ténnis, “tennis”), his favourite sport.
Words formed from tetris
- inventory Tetris
- Tetris algorithm
- Tetris effect
- Tetris-like
Questions about tetris
- What does tetris mean?
- Tetris means to arrange items in a constrained space.
- What part of speech is tetris?
- Tetris can be a verb, a proper noun or a noun.
- How do you pronounce tetris?
- Tetris is pronounced /ˈtɛtɹɪs/ (UK).
- What is the past tense of tetris?
- The past tense of tetris is tetrised.
Words near tetris in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: tetris (page history and authors); Tetris (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-Tetris.wav.
Cite this entry: “tetris.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tetris. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.