Word.ws English Dictionary

tickle the dragon's tail

tickle the dragon's tail verb: to do something that has a risk of going catastrophically wrong.

tickle the dragon's tail: to do something that has a risk of going catastrophically wrong
Image: Los Alamos National Laboratory, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Verb

tickle the dragon's tail (third-person singular simple present tickles the dragon's tail, present participle tickling the dragon's tail, simple past and past participle tickled the dragon's tail)

  1. (idiomatic) To do something that has a risk of going catastrophically wrong.
    • Climbing so close to an erupting volcano was tickling the dragon's tail.
  2. (idiomatic) To annoy an irritable person.
    • Don't tell him the headline's misprinted; you don't want to tickle the dragon's tail.
  3. (nuclear physics) To bring two subcritical masses close together in order to find the edge of criticality.
    • The laboratory head tickles the dragon's tail whenever we have guests as a show of machismo.
    • Every real boy likes to tickle the dragon's tail. Maybe I was a little old for it, but that's what I was doing there in the Moran III jungle. I got the shield off my cigarette lighter and jerked out the dinky little damper rods for the pile and started easing the two little bricks toward each other...1957, Jim Harman, “Break a Leg”, in Galaxy Magazine, volume 6, numbers 1-6, page 130

Examples of tickle the dragon's tail in a sentence

  • Every real boy likes to tickle the dragon's tail.1957, Jim Harman, “Break a Leg”, in Galaxy Magazine, volume 6, numbers 1-6, page 130:
  • Were this assembly functional, a person might manipulate the bricks of the radiant castlelike structure to slow down the neutrons, to "tickle the dragon's tail," as Morland writes2003, Jonathan P. Binstock, Jim Sanborn, Atomic Time: Pure Science and Seduction, page 13:

Forms of tickle the dragon's tail

third-person singular presenttickles the dragon's tail
present participletickling the dragon's tail
past participletickled the dragon's tail
pasttickled the dragon's tail

Origin of tickle the dragon's tail

From the obvious risk of tickling a dragon's tail. In physics, it was coined by American physicist Richard Feynman to describe the experiments of Louis Slotin at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Questions about tickle the dragon's tail

What does tickle the dragon's tail mean?
Tickle the dragon's tail means to do something that has a risk of going catastrophically wrong.
How do you use tickle the dragon's tail in a sentence?
Every real boy likes to tickle the dragon's tail.
What part of speech is tickle the dragon's tail?
Tickle the dragon's tail is a verb.
What is the past tense of tickle the dragon's tail?
The past tense of tickle the dragon's tail is tickled the dragon's tail.

Words near tickle the dragon's tail in the dictionary

  1. tickle
  2. tickle pink
  3. tickle someone's fancy
  4. tickle someone's funny bone
  5. tickle someone's pickle
  6. tickle the dragon's tail
  7. tickle the ear
  8. tickle the ivories
  9. tickle the ivory
  10. tickle the sausage
  11. tickle the wire

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tickle the dragon's tail (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: En-au-tickle the dragon's tail.ogg.

Cite this entry: “tickle the dragon's tail.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tickle_the_dragon%27s_tail. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.