teaser
/ˈtiːzə
/noun
1 informal A tricky question or task: the teams get the chance to pose the opposition some teasers...
- He said: ‘Laurie is amazing for her age, she does crosswords, puzzles, teasers and she plays Scrabble.’
- They certainly can Jonnie, and our mail bag is bulging following your tricky teaser.
- Ballmer was asked the classic teaser question: what he would have done differently.
2A person who makes fun of or provokes others in a playful or unkind way.In an odd way, both the teasers and supporters appear to help youths keep pledges....
- Geraldo Rivera is a war correspondent, or so the teasers on Fox News tell us.
- Calling her son after a cheesy Abba song can only have created the need for him to prove he was not the nancy boy that the less open-minded - and there are plenty of playground teasers in that bracket - might have assumed from his moniker.
2.1A person who tempts someone sexually with no intention of satisfying the desire aroused.He was the teaser of them all, and was a huge flirt.
2.2An inferior stallion or ram used to excite mares or ewes before they are served by the stud animal.In this context the Department has urged breeders - thoroughbred and non-thoroughbred alike - to test and vaccinate stallions and teasers to be used during 2004 breeding season....
- The other two horses - a teaser and a retired lead pony - were both owned by Ford.
3A short introductory advertisement for a product that stimulates interest by remaining cryptic: promotional teasers in every commercial break...
- J K Rowling has been particularly secretive about the plot, but she has released a couple of short extracts as a teaser.
- There's two trailers, a short teaser and a longer full trailer, both available in Dolby Digital 5.1 and anamorphic widescreen.
- Also, the previews showed a teaser for a movie called ‘Goodbye Lenin’ that looks interesting as well - it's about a German woman who wakes up from a coma.
4 Fishing A lure or bait trailed behind a boat to attract fish: the fish followed the teaser to within thirty feet of the boat...
- I am about to make a turn back, the two of us still looking for further splashes when without warning the short bait, riding behind the Big Herbie teaser, is smacked hard and instantly we are into a fish.
- I saw the fish clearly then, bill out of the water, the fish acting like a sailfish at a teaser.
- The boat seemed almost to be floating on nothing: suspended, as it were, sixty feet above the brilliant corals, as we trolled our teasers, about half a mile offshore.
