Tier
//ˈtaɪ.ə// noun, verb
noun, verb ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 One who ties (knots, etc.).
- 2 A row or range, especially one at a higher or lower level than another.
- 3 one of two or more layers one atop another wordnet
- 4 Something that ties.
- 5 A rank or grade; a stratum.
"Stoke City were playing in the second tier of English football before being promoted to the Premier League."
Show 7 more definitions
- 6 something that is used for tying wordnet
- 7 A child's apron. archaic
- 8 A (typically forested) range of hills or mountains, especially in South Australia or Tasmania; a mountain. Australia
"This party headed towards the tiers and lakes, scouring the country while veering towards Bothwell."
- 9 a worker who ties something wordnet
- 10 A horizontal row of panels within a comic strip.
- 11 any one of two or more competitors who tie one another wordnet
- 12 a relative position or degree of value in a graded group wordnet
Verb
- 1 To arrange in layers. transitive
- 2 To cascade in an overlapping sequence. transitive
- 3 To move (data) from one storage medium to another as an optimization, based on how frequently it is accessed. transitive
Example
More examples"John is obsessed about getting into a top tier university."
Etymology
Etymology 1
From tie + -er.
Etymology 2
From Middle French tier, from Old French tire (“rank, sequence, order, kind”), probably from tirer (“to draw, draw out”). Alternatively, from a Germanic source related to Middle English tir (“honour, glory, power, rule”), Old English tīr (“glory, honour, fame”), Old Norse tírr (“glory, honour, renown”).
Related phrases
More for "tier"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.