Tweezers are the small pinching tool for pulling out single hairs or thorns. A pair of tweezers, use tweezers, sterilise the tweezers.
For a tick they are the wrong tool unless they are fine-pointed, because squeezing the body pushes more in. The word is always plural and takes a pair, like scissors and pliers. It comes from an old word for a case of small instruments.
1nountweezersA small pinching tool for pulling out hairs or thorns.
“She used tweezers to pull a splinter out of her son's finger.”
tweezers is a tool.
A plural formed from tweeze, from an obsolete word for a case of small instruments, from French etui.
Latin
studēre — to care about
Vulgar Latin
*estudiāre — to keep, treat with care
Old French
estui — container, prison
French
étuis
English, today
tweezers
Built from
17th century (1645–55): plural of tweeser (on the model of nippers, pincers, pliers or scissors), from obsolete tweese (“case for small instruments”) (or alternatively, alteration of plural form tweeses), aphetic form of earlier etweese (plural of etwee), from French étuis, plural of étui (“case, box, cover”) (from Old French estui (“container, prison”), derivative of étuier (earlier spelling, estuier (“to shut up, guard, keep, preserve, save, enclose, place in a cover”), probably from Vulgar Latin estudiāre (“to keep, treat with care”) or studiāre, from Latin studēre (“to care about”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA