Etymology: Generally held to be derived < tickle adj. or tickle v.¹, and so to go with tickle n.² (see quot. 1908); but some would identify it with English dialect stickle ‘a rapid shallow place in a river’. In Nova Scotia also tittle.

Etymology: < tickle v.¹

Etymology: Goes with tickle v.¹: the use of the verb-stem as adjective is unusual; but compare kittle adj. beside kittle v.¹

Etymology: Not recorded in Old English, which however had tinclian to tickle. Known first after 1300 in form tikelle , side by side with the adjective tykel , tikel : origin and history doubtful. Falk and Torp take it as a frequentative derivative of tick v.¹ to touch lightly, pat. It has also been inferred to be a metathetic form of kittle v.¹, parallel to Alemannic dialect zicklen, beside German kitzeln to tickle.Derivation < tick v.¹, in sense ‘to touch lightly’, would, both in form and sense, suit the later use of tickle , but is not favoured by the chronology (since tick is not known so early as tickle ), nor by the fact that the earliest recorded sense includes no notion of light touching or of the action of any external agent, but merely expresses a bodily sensation. These considerations partly also affect the theory of metathesis < kittle , inasmuch as the latter, except in the verbal noun kitelung (a1100), kitlyng , has not been found before 1440, and is from the first transitive, = Latin titillare to tickle (some one). But in Old Norse, kitla , like hungra , þyrsta , etc., was an impersonal verb of primary sensation: mig kitlar ‘it kittles me’, like mig hungrar ‘it hungers me’. Traces of this appear also with ‘tickle’: see ‘it tikleth me’ in sense 3. It was natural for an impersonal verb to develop both intransitive and transitive constructions: compare the senses of irk v., and the modern it grieves me with I grieve and you grieve me. It seems possible that Old Norse kitla was adopted at an early date in some parts of England as kit(e)l-en, kittel-, and in others, under the influence of tick, as tikl-, tikel-, and that the latter became the general English form, while the more original kitl-, kittle, was used farther north, and was thus later in literary record. Neither form appears in Cursor Mundi.