tig

/tɪɡ/

tig verb: to touch lightly or playfully; to trifle, dally.

Verb

tig (third-person singular simple present tigs, present participle tigging, simple past and past participle tigged)

tig (plural tigs)

(dialectal) A light touch; a tap or pat.
(Ireland, Scotland, England apart from the south) The children's game of tag.
- One evening when playing tig she had put her hands over his eyes: long and white and thin and cold and soft.1916, James Joyce, chapter I, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, New York, N.Y.: B[enjamin] W. Huebsch, →OCLC, page 36

tig (plural tigs)

(historical) A capacious, flat-bottomed drinking cup, generally with four handles, formerly used for passing around the table at convivial entertainment.

TIG (not comparable)

(abbreviation, acronym) Acronym of tungsten inert gas; pertaining to TIG welding.

Verb
third-person singular present	tigs
present participle	tigging
past participle	tigged
past	tigged
Noun
plural	tigs
alternative form	tyg

Dialectal variant of tick, from Middle English ticken, tiken. More at tick.

25 more rhymesFewer rhymes

What does tig mean?: Tig means to touch lightly or playfully; to trifle, dally.
What part of speech is tig?: Tig can be a verb, a noun or an adjective.
How do you pronounce tig?: Tig is pronounced /tɪɡ/.
What is the past tense of tig?: The past tense of tig is tigged.

Adapted from Wiktionary: tig (page history and authors); TIG (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: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-tig.wav.

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