Tear-off

adj, noun

adj, noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A strip or sheet of paper, plastic film, etc., that is designed to be removed by tearing or pulling off.

    "My visor was covered in mud, and I had used up all the tear-offs."

  2. 2
    A pull-down menu that can be detached from its parent menu bar and dragged around the screen.

    "Tear-offs are rarely found in modern interfaces, though, so typically you'll want to disable the tear-off feature by default."

  3. 3
    A COM (Component Object Model) interface that is instantiated only when explicitly requested.

    "This makes tearoffs especially risky for objects that may be accessed remotely. Given all of the potential pitfalls of tearoffs, a logical question might be, "when are tearoffs appropriate?" There is no absolute answer; […]"

Adjective
  1. 1
    Designed to be removed by tearing or pulling off. not-comparable

    "a tear-off strip, a tear-off protector"

Example

More examples

"My visor was covered in mud, and I had used up all the tear-offs."

Etymology

Deverbal from tear off.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.