tinker
Americannoun
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tinkers
plural
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a mender of pots, kettles, pans, etc., usually an itinerant.
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an unskillful or clumsy worker; bungler.
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a person skilled in various minor kinds of mechanical work; jack-of-all-trades.
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an act or instance of tinkering.
Let me have a tinker at that motor.
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Scot., Irish English.
verb (used without object)
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tinkers,
present (3rd person singular)
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tinkered,
past participle, past
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tinkering
present participle
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to busy oneself with a thing without useful results.
Stop tinkering with that clock and take it to the repair shop.
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to work unskillfully or clumsily at anything.
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to do the work of a tinker.
verb (used with object)
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tinkers,
present (3rd person singular)
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tinkered,
past participle, past
-
tinkering
present participle
-
to mend as a tinker.
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to repair in an unskillful, clumsy, or makeshift way.
noun
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(esp formerly) a travelling mender of pots and pans
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a clumsy worker
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the act of tinkering
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another name for Gypsy
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informal a mischievous child
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any of several small mackerels that occur off the North American coast of the Atlantic
verb
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to play, fiddle, or meddle (with machinery, etc), esp while undertaking repairs
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to mend (pots and pans) as a tinker
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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tinkersimple
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tinkerssimple
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have tinkeredperfect
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has tinkeredperfect
-
am tinkeringprogressive
-
are tinkeringprogressive
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is tinkeringprogressive
-
have been tinkeringperfect progressive
-
has been tinkeringperfect progressive
Past
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tinkeredsimple
-
had tinkeredperfect
-
was tinkeringprogressive
-
were tinkeringprogressive
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had been tinkeringperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of tinker
First recorded in 1225–75; Middle English tinkere (noun), syncopated variant of tinekere “worker in tin”
Explanation
When you tinker, you work casually or attempt to fix something, the way you might tinker with your brother's old bike or tinker with the website you're building for fun. As a verb, tinker means to fix (or mess around with) just about anything. For example, your creative writing teacher might ask you to tinker with your most recent short story and add more specific, vivid details. As a noun, tinker refers to a person whose job involves traveling around and fixing things. It's an old-fashioned word, dating from the 13th century, when traveling tinsmith wasn't an uncommon occupation.
Vocabulary lists containing tinker
Milkweed
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The Boy Who Invented TV
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Peter Pan
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Reworking her pieces felt, she writes, like a “soothing exercise, a way to return to a younger self and tinker with her words and assumptions.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 24, 2026
For a long time, I’d watched Paul tinker with the recipe for his perfect relationship.
From Salon ● Jul. 5, 2026
But there may be a reluctance to tinker too much with a midfield of McTominay, Lewis Ferguson, Ben Gannon-Doak and Ryan Christie which purred so perfectly, particularly in the first half.
From BBC ● Jun. 13, 2026
“I’m able to just go out and play baseball as opposed to trying to tinker and fix certain stuff.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 26, 2026
“A few days earlier, Taborlin had met a tinker on the road. And even though Taborlin didn’t have much to eat, he shared his dinner with the old man.”
From "The Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss
As fans and pundits begin to predict City's downfall, Guardiola tinkers with his squad before a long winning streak results in his club being crowned Premier League champions.
From BBC ● Apr. 25, 2026
As curious gas-station patrons wander in to see what’s behind the secret door, he tinkers with smoke and professional-grade whippers and runs cocktail mixtures through a centrifuge to smooth the texture.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 9, 2026
Even discretionary spending, the money Congress tinkers with every year, is soaring.
From Washington Times ● May 12, 2023
As he tinkers, he discovers that time and space are breaking down in his immediate vicinity.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 23, 2023
There were tradesmen, traders, tinkers, masons, and carpenters, hauling goods of one kind or another.
From "Crispin: The Cross of Lead" by Avi
As the production fell further and further behind schedule, Mr. Pallenberg frantically rewrote the ending, blithely confessing that he tinkered around with killing off this or that character as the mood struck.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 27, 2026
He’s tinkered with different grips for his changeup, a pitch he started deploying more in mid-May.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 13, 2026
If Ms. Wilson has tinkered with Homer’s value system, as some allege, she has also kept closer than others to the original length and meter of the poem.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 10, 2026
Along the way, he tinkered with classical music on 1991's Liverpool Oratorio and released a series of dance albums as The Fireman.
From BBC ● May 27, 2026
Clever citrine eyes danced back and forth as Mama tinkered with the lock, and when the beast flicked his forked black tongue between the bars, a smell like smoke tinged the dry air.
From "Beasts of Prey" by Ayana Gray
And over time, from their tinkering comes their version of right and good.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 11, 2026
One moment, Athipat Wichan was tinkering with song ideas off stage while watching his band perform to a packed crowd at a bar in Bangkok.
From BBC ● Jul. 16, 2026
Far from being a flawless machine, the body reads more like a patchwork of compromises shaped by millions of years of evolutionary tinkering.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 11, 2026
In terms of continued tinkering, Vanguard has several possible solutions to this issue, one being even more auto-enrollment and auto-escalation adoption by company plans, so more workers have savings.
From MarketWatch ● Jun. 16, 2026
Instead, he possessed a mind capable of tinkering with things just enough to make them impossibly confusing and himself so dissatisfied with his own intellectual inadequacies that he would never be happy.
From "The Milagro Beanfield War" by John Nichols
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
