tetris

name

1. A puzzle video game in which falling tetrominoes must be manipulated to form complete lines, which are then cleared from the grid.

   “There is one nice moment in the music, but it's not the moment identified by the owner of the system, and one idiot goes so far as to gush, "This is better than Tetris!"”

   “From the kitchen the guy said, "I write science fiction. Or I'm trying to write. I've been staring at that screen for three days. You just interrupted a one-hour Tetris marathon. I need to talk to a real human being."”

   “[…]there were some other guys there who were into cosplay—that's costume play—and their thing was, they were dressed as Tetris blocks.”

   “Prior to this, DAS and Hypertapping were the two standards for Tetris pros, but Rolling allows for a high amount of button presses per second without the "superhuman finger speeds" needed for Hypertapping, modified controllers, or any gloves - which also makes it is perfectly legal for tournament play.”

2. (figuratively)An endeavor involving rearranging things of different shape into a physical space.

   “Then I looked at the furniture. It was all a bit unimaginative, so I rearranged everything at a jaunty angle. When I returned to the cellar I was still playing Tetris with the cooker in my head.”

   “While I worked out a Tetris-like arrangement to get all of the leftovers into the oven, Phil's curiosity got the better of him.”

   “When people spoke to me, the sounds of their words were Tetris shapes, falling. All I had to do was put each one in its bright, satisfying place.”

   “The tetris method does have some shortcomings, however. In placements produced by Feng Shui, the cells are closely packed.”

   “Scheduling a meeting with ten people is a form of calendar Tetris.”

noun

1. (broadly)The act of clearing four lines at once (the maximum possible) in Tetris.

   “For some it's staying low on the play field, steadily advancing through the levels, for others its ^([sic]) trying to clear the board entirely or scoring an unprecedented number of tetrises.”

   “See figure 3 for an example of a logical decision tree that indicates whether there is a possibility to score a tetris.”

   “Maximizing the number of tetrises (the number of times that four rows are cleared in a Tetris game) is NP-complete.”

   “Score two Tetrises in two drops playing Marathon.”

verb

1. (slang, transitive)To arrange items in a constrained space.

   “It will be hard to tetris all this furniture into the moving van.”