Word.ws English Dictionary

twire

/ˈtwaɪə(ɹ)/

twire verb: to glance shyly or slyly; look askance; make eyes; leer; peer; pry.

Verb (1)

twire (third-person singular simple present twires, present participle twiring, simple past and past participle twired)

  1. (intransitive) To glance shyly or slyly; look askance; make eyes; leer; peer; pry.
    • I saw the wench that twired and twinkled at thee.c. 1619–1623, John Fletcher, “Women Pleas’d”, in Comedies and Tragedies […], London: […] Humphrey Robinson, […], and for Humphrey Moseley […], published 1647, →OCLC, Act IV, scene i
    • Which maids will twire at 'tween their fingers.c. 1637, Ben Jonson, The Sad Shepherd
  2. (intransitive) To twinkle; sparkle; wink.
    • When sparkling stars twire not, thou gild'st the even.1609, William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 28”, in Shake-speares Sonnets. […], London: By G[eorge] Eld for T[homas] T[horpe] and are to be sold by William Aspley, →OCLC

Noun (1)

twire (plural twires)

  1. A sly glance; a leer.

Noun (2)

twire (plural twires)

  1. A twisted filament; a thread.
    • they put the cocons in hot water, and so stirring them about with a kind of rod, the ends of the silk twires of the cocons stick to it1766, John Locke, Observations Upon The Growth And Culture Of Vines And Olives […]

Verb (2)

twire (third-person singular simple present twires, present participle twiring, simple past and past participle twired)

  1. (transitive) To twist; twirl.

Noun (3)

twire (plural twires)

  1. (obsolete) A pipe through which the blast is delivered to the interior of a blast furnace, or to the fire of a forge; a tuyere.

Forms of twire

Verb
third-person singular presenttwires
present participletwiring
past participletwired
pasttwired
alternative formtweer
Noun
pluraltwires

Origin of twire

From Middle English twiren (“to peep out, pry about, twinkle, glance, gleam”), cognate with Middle High German zwieren (“to spy”), Bavarian zwiren, zwieren (“to spy, glance”). Perhaps related to Old English twinclian (“to twinkle”). More at twinkle.

From Middle English *twir, *twirn, twern, from Old English *twirn, *tweorn (“twine, thread”), from Proto-West Germanic *twiʀn (“thread”), from Proto-Indo-European *duwo- (“two”). Doublet of twine.

Perhaps from a dialectal form of *twere, from Middle English *tweren, from Old English þweran (“to stir”) (found in compound āþweran (“to agitate, stir”)), from Proto-Germanic *þweraną (“to stir”), from Proto-Indo-European *twer- (“to turn, twirl, swirl, move”). Cognate with Bavarian zweren (“to stir”). Compare twirk, twirl.

Words formed from twire

Questions about twire

What does twire mean?
Twire means to glance shyly or slyly; look askance; make eyes; leer; peer; pry.
What part of speech is twire?
Twire can be a verb or a noun.
How do you pronounce twire?
Twire is pronounced /ˈtwaɪə(ɹ)/.
What is the past tense of twire?
The past tense of twire is twired.

Words near twire in the dictionary

  1. twintuition
  2. twiny
  3. twip
  4. Twiplomacy
  5. twips
  6. twire
  7. twire-pipe
  8. twire-pipes
  9. twired
  10. twires
  11. twiring

Source and license

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