tweener

noun

1. (informal)A tweenager.

   “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. (informal)A person or thing that is between two categories, classes or age groups.

   “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.””

   “Right now, Mr. Ryan's attention is on the "tweeners," savings and loans that are not obviously "brain dead," in regulatory parlance, and that at the same time are not clear winners – a group with $247 billion in assets.”

   “So BMW has conjured a tweener — a roomier hatchback on platform shoes, with standard all-wheel drive — to attract customers who crave the 3 Series’ performance but need more utility to close the deal.”

   “Scout is old enough that her traveling dynamic with Sam isn’t the kid-adult one of “Paper Moon”; it’s more like a tweener with a crush on a college man.”

3. (informal)A person or thing that is between two categories, classes or age groups.

   “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.”

   ““Isaac plays fast, never stops,” said Coach Parker, who labels him as “a tweener.” ¶ That means he’s big and strong enough to take care of business in the middle of the line, and quick and agile enough to cover the flanks and harass the quarterback.”

4. (informal)A person or thing that is between two categories, classes or age groups.

   “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. (informal)A person or thing that is between two categories, classes or age groups.

   “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.”

6. (informal, slang)A person or thing that is between two categories, classes or age groups.

   “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.”

   “When Crockett hit TBS, [Ric] Flair was a babyface within its territory, but a heel in the areas he visited as champion, so it compromised, and on TBS, he became a “tweener” who took on all comers.”

7. (informal)A person or thing that is between two categories, classes or age groups.

   “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).”