Tweener
noun, slang ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A tweenager. informal
"But a half-dozen other movies geared toward the teenage and 'tween girl market – 'tweeners are girls from 8 to 12 years old – have failed to make more than a slight dent at the box office."
- 2 A person or thing that is between two categories, classes or age groups. informal
"I assigned one of my groups of heart patients the task of sorting a hundred art reproductions into three piles: beautiful, in between, and ugly. The five men sat down to begin work. The first few paintings were easily classified and group decision was rapid. As they progressed, however, one of the men commented, “I think this one is sort of a tweener.”"
- 3 A person or thing that is between two categories, classes or age groups.; A person who plays at two positions, especially if not good enough at either to be restricted to it. informal
"Crowder was 6-foot-6 and 230 pounds, so those scouts naturally called him a tweener — a power forward in a wing player’s body. The Celtics forward admits to even going along with the stereotype."
- 4 A person or thing that is between two categories, classes or age groups.; A computing device that is smaller than a traditional laptop, but larger than a PDA. informal
"Trailing a little behind that in hype are the ’tweeners: the larger-format Windows CE Palm Pro portables. They’re not quite notebooks or subnotebooks, but they’re bigger than handhelds."
- 5 A person or thing that is between two categories, classes or age groups.; A boxer in various newcomer weight classes whose names often contain super, light or junior. informal
"Undoubtedly, his record versus welterweights (147 pounds) is better than against full-blown middleweights (160 pounds). Being a tweener, Graziano probably would have campaigned as a junior middleweight (154 pounds) if he fought today."
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- 6 A person or thing that is between two categories, classes or age groups.; A professional wrestler who is neutral or morally ambiguous; neither a face nor a heel, or showing no favoritism to either allegiance. informal, slang
"There are old-school wrestlers, submission wrestlers, hardcore wrestlers, hillbilly wrestlers, masked Mexican lucha libre wrestlers, shoot wrestlers, and wrestlers who just talk a lot and never actually wrestle. There are babyfaces (good guys), heels (bad guys), ’tweeners, and crossovers."
- 7 A person or thing that is between two categories, classes or age groups.; A film that falls between two genres or audiences (and thus may not be easily marketed). informal
"With a less bankable cast, “Cold Mountain” became an $80-million-plus “tweener,” neither a blockbuster studio movie nor a modest “indiewood” production like “Lost in Translation.”"
- 8 A shot that is hit between the legs.
"The No 2 seed dismissed the challenge of the world No 82, Panna Udvardy of Hungary, in just over an hour with eight aces, 27 winners and even a tweener, treating the crowd to her power and athleticism on her return to Wimbledon after missing the event last year because of the ban on Russians and Belarusians competing."
- 9 A person, machine, or piece of software that performs tweening.
"While it lacks true function curves for complete control of tweening, Carrara has several kinds of tweeners that allow decent control of object movement between keyframes (the Spline and Velocity Graph tweeners are most useful)."
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"But a half-dozen other movies geared toward the teenage and 'tween girl market – 'tweeners are girls from 8 to 12 years old – have failed to make more than a slight dent at the box office."
Etymology
From 'tween + -er.
Related phrases
More for "tweener"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.