Other forms: tinkering, tinkers, tinkered
To tinker is to make small adjustments in the hope of improving something. No plan, and no certainty it will help.
It takes with, and the word carries a hint of futility, since tinkering with a system usually means fiddling rather than fixing. Politics uses it as a criticism, so tinkering at the edges means avoiding real reform. There is a much older noun, since a tinker was a travelling mender of pots and pans, and the phrase not giving a tinker's curse comes from that trade.
1verbtinkerTo make small adjustments to something, often without real effect.
“He spent all weekend tinkering with the engine.”
A tinker may be a tin-worker in the plainest possible sense: tin plus an old ending for the person who works with a thing, the same one that made Old English bēocere, a beekeeper.
Old English
*tincere
Middle English
tynkere
English, today
tinker
Built from
From Middle English tynkere, perhaps from Old English tincere, from tin + cere, as in bēocere (“beekeeper”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Man Called Ove
First appears in chapter 29 of A Man Called Ove.
Practise this word