different between twitch vs reflex

English

Etymology 1

From Middle English twicchen, from Old English *twi??an, from Proto-West Germanic *twikkijan (“to nail, pin, fasten, clasp, pinch”). Cognate with English tweak, Low German twikken, German Low German twicken (“to pinch, pinch off”), zweck?n and gizwickan (> German zwicken (“to pinch”)).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /tw?t??/, [t?w??t??]
• Rhymes: -?t?

Noun

twitch (countable and uncountable, plural twitches)

1. A brief, small (sometimes involuntary) movement out of place and then back again; a spasm.

2. (informal) Action of spotting or seeking out a bird, especially a rare one.
3. (farriery) A stick with a hole in one end through which passes a loop, which can be drawn tightly over the upper lip or an ear of a horse and twisted to keep the animal quiet during minor surgery.

   Synonym: barnacle

   • 1861, John Henry Walsh, The Horse in the Stable and in the Field

     THE TWITCH is a short stick of strong ash, about the size of a mopstick, with a hole pierced near the end, through which is passed a piece of strong but small cord, and tied in a loop large enough to admit the open hand freely.

4. (physiology) A brief, contractile response of a skeletal muscle elicited by a single maximal volley of impulses in the neurons supplying it.
5. (mining) The sudden narrowing almost to nothing of a vein of ore.
6. (birdwatching) A trip taken in order to observe a rare bird.

Derived terms

• nervous twitch
• twitch game

Translations

References

• Twitch in The Free Dictionary (Medicine)

Verb

twitch (third-person singular simple present twitches, present participle twitching, simple past and past participle twitched)

1. (intransitive) To perform a twitch; spasm.

2. (transitive) To cause to twitch; spasm.
   • 1922, Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

     Their feet padded softly on the ground, and they crept quite close to him, twitching their noses...

3. (transitive) To jerk sharply and briefly.

   • Thrice they twitched the diamond in her ear.

4. (obsolete) To exert oneself. [15th-17th c.]
5. (transitive) To spot or seek out a bird, especially a rare one.
   • 1995, Quarterly Review of Biology vol. 70 p. 348:

     "The Birdwatchers Handbook ... will be a clear asset to those who 'twitch' in Europe."

   • 2003, Mark Cocker, Birders: Tales of a Tribe [1], ?ISBN, page 52:

     "But the key revelation from twitching that wonderful Iceland Gull on 10 March 1974 wasn't its eroticism. It was the sheer innocence of it."

   • 2005, Sean Dooley, The Big Twitch: One Man, One Continent, a Race Against Time [2], ?ISBN, page 119:

     "I hadn't seen John since I went to Adelaide to (unsuccessfully) twitch the '87 Northern Shoveler, when I was a skinny, eighteen- year-old kid. "

Translations

Usage notes

When used of birdwatchers by ignorant outsiders, this term frequently carries a negative connotation.

Derived terms

• atwitch

Etymology 2

alternate of quitch

Noun

twitch (uncountable)

1. couch grass (Elymus repens; a species of grass, often considered as a weed)

Translations

English

Etymology

From Late Latin reflexus, past participle of reflectere (“to bend back”). Photography sense is from noun sense meaning “reflection”.

Pronunciation

• (noun, adjective) IPA^(key): /??i?fl?ks/
• (verb) IPA^(key): /???fl?ks/

Noun

reflex (plural reflexes)

1. An automatic response to a simple stimulus which does not require mental processing.
   • 1970, Stanis?aw Lem, trans. Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox, Solaris:

     For a while, I shall have to make a conscious effort to smile, nod, stand and perform the thousands of little gestures which constitute life on Earth, and then those gestures will become reflexes again.

1. (linguistics) The descendant of an earlier language element, such as a word or phoneme, in a daughter language.

   Synonym: derivative

   Antonym: etymon

   Coordinate term: cognate

2. The descendant of anything from an earlier time, such as a cultural myth.
   • 1898, Christian Brinton, in The Century

     The superstition of the loup-garou, or werewolf, belongs to the folklore of most modern nations, and has its reflex in the story of "Little Red Riding-hood" and others.

3. (chiefly photography) Reflection or an image produced by reflection. The light reflected from an illuminated surface to one in shade.

Translations

Adjective

reflex (comparative more reflex, superlative most reflex)

1. Bent, turned back or reflected.
   • 1677, Matthew Hale, The Primitive Origination of Mankind, Considered and Examined According to the Light of Nature

     the reflex act of the soul, or the turning of the intellectual eye inward upon its own actions

2. Produced automatically by a stimulus.
3. (geometry, of an angle) Having greater than 180 degrees but less than 360 degrees.
   • 1878, James Maurice Wilson, Elementary Geometry, MacMillan, page 10:

     A polygon is said to be convex when no one of its angles is reflex.

   • 1895, David Eugen Smith and Wooster Woodruff Bernan, New Plane and Solid Geometry, page 7:

     An angle less than a right angle is said to be acute; one greater than a right angle but less than a straight angle is said to be obtuse; one greater than a straight angle but less than a perigon is said to be reflex or convex.

   • 1958, Howard Fehr, “On Teaching Dihedral Angle and Steradian” in The Mathematics Teacher, v 51, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, page 275:

     If the reflex region is the interior of the angle, the dihedral angle is reflex.

   • 1991, B. Falcidieno et al, “Configurable Representations in Feature-based Modelling” in Eurographics '91: Proceedings, North-Holland, page 145:

     A reflex edge of a polyhedron is an edge where the inner dihedral angle subtended by two incident faces is greater than 180°.

   • 2001, Esther M. Arkin et al, “On the Reflexivity of Point Sets”, in Algorithms and data structures: 7th International Workshop, WADS 2001: Proceedings, Springer, page 195:

     We say that an angle is convex if it is not reflex.

   • 2004, Ana Paula Tomás and António Leslie Bajuelos, “Quadratic-Time Linear-Space Algorithms Generating Orthogonal Polygons with a Given Number of Vertices”, in Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2004 Proceedings, part 3, Springer, page 117:

     P denotes a polygon and r the number of reflex vertices.

4. (painting) Illuminated by light reflected from another part of the same picture.

Synonyms

• (of an angle): re-entrant

Derived terms

Translations

Verb

reflex (third-person singular simple present reflexes, present participle reflexing, simple past and past participle reflexed)

1. (transitive) To bend, turn back or reflect.
2. To respond to a stimulus.

Anagrams

• Flexer

Catalan

Etymology

From Latin reflexus, first attested 1803.

Adjective

reflex (feminine reflexa, masculine plural reflexos, feminine plural reflexes)

1. reflected

   Synonym: reflectit

2. (psychology) reflex

3. (botany) reflexed
4. (linguistics) reflexive

   Synonym: reflexiu

Noun

reflex m (plural reflexos)

1. reflection (something that is reflected)

   Synonym: reflexió

2. reflex (an automatic response to a simple stimulus)

Further reading

• “reflex” in Diccionari de la llengua catalana, segona edició, Institut d’Estudis Catalans.
• “reflex” in Diccionari normatiu valencià, Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua.
• “reflex” in Diccionari català-valencià-balear, Antoni Maria Alcover and Francesc de Borja Moll, 1962.

References

Czech

Noun

reflex m

1. reflex

Related terms

• See flexe

Further reading

• reflex in P?íru?ní slovník jazyka ?eského, 1935–1957
• reflex in Slovník spisovného jazyka ?eského, 1960–1971, 1989

Dutch

Etymology

Borrowed from French réflexe, from Latin reflexus.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /re??fl?ks/, /r??fl?ks/
• Hyphenation: re?flex
• Rhymes: -?ks

Noun

reflex m (plural reflexen, diminutive reflexjes n)

1. reflex (automatic response by an organism)

   Synonym: reflexus

Derived terms

• reflexachtig
• reflexmatig

Descendants

• ? Indonesian: refleks

Hungarian

Etymology

From German Reflex, from French réflexe.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): [?r?fl?ks]
• Hyphenation: ref?lex
• Rhymes: -?ks

Noun

reflex (plural reflexek)

1. reflex (an automatic response to a simple stimulus which does not require mental processing)
2. (photography) reflection

   Synonyms: visszfény, tükröz?dés

Declension

Derived terms

References

Further reading

• reflex in Bárczi, Géza and László Országh: A magyar nyelv értelmez? szótára (’The Explanatory Dictionary of the Hungarian Language’). Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1959–1962. Fifth ed., 1992: ?ISBN

Romanian

Etymology

From French réflexe, from Latin Reflex.

Adjective

reflex m or n (feminine singular reflex?, masculine plural reflec?i, feminine and neuter plural reflexe)

1. reflex

Declension

Swedish

Etymology

From French réflexe, first attested 1811.

Noun

reflex c

1. a reflex, a (quick and spontaneous) reaction
2. a reflector (tag, strip or band; carried by pedestrians and bicyclists to be visible from automobiles)

Declension

References