Other forms: tilted, tilting, tilts
To tilt something is to lift one side of it so it stops being level. You tilt your head to read the spine of a book, tilt the jug to get the last of the milk out, tilt the seat back on a long flight.
Things tilt on their own as well — the old fence tilts a bit further every winter, and the Earth's tilt of twenty-three degrees is the reason there are seasons at all. As a noun it is the slope itself: the tilt of her head, a floor with a tilt to it, a picture hanging at a tilt. Photographers keep tilt and pan apart and it is worth copying them, because you tilt a camera up and down and you pan it left and right. The figurative use runs the same way as the physical one: new evidence tilts a case, a hard winter tilts an election, and tilting the balance means making one side heavier. Full tilt is the odd one out — it means at top speed, with no leaning in it at all.
1verbtiltTo move something so that one side is higher than the other.~41%
“He tilted the tray and everything slid to one end.”
synonyms: lean, slant
2verbwalkTo lean out of the level by itself.~18%
“The old fence tilts more every winter.”
3nounslopeA slope away from level.~39%
“There is a slight tilt to the whole floor.”
4verbadvantageTo move an advantage towards one side.~2%
“The new evidence tilted the case.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 170 sentences found in the wild and placed 91 of them on a sense (79 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Tilt began as unsteadiness rather than aim. Old English had tealt, shaky, and a verb meaning to be unstable on your feet, from a root that meant to shake or hesitate. The neat controlled lean of a camera or a chair is the tidy end of a word that started out wobbling.
Proto-Indo-European
*del-
Proto-West Germanic
*talt
Old English
*tieltan
Middle English
tilte
English, today
tilt
Built from
From Middle English tilte, from Old English tieltan, tieltan (“to be unsteady”), related to the adjective tealt (“unsteady”), from Proto-West Germanic talt, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European del-, dul- (“to shake, hesitate”), see also Dutch touteren (“to tremble”), frr talt, tolt (“unstable, shaky”). Cognate with Icelandic tölt (“an ambling pace”). The nominal sense of "a joust" appears around 1510, presumably derived from the barrier which separated the combatants, which suggests connection with tilt "covering". The modern transitive meaning is from 1590; the intransitive use appears 1620. The sense of gaming frustration is said to originate with pinball.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA