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I have seen some young kids like to tease somebody and laugh at the person and think this is a lots of fun for them, I would like to know if there is any word or idiom that explains their action.

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    Context could be important here to get the right idiom...is the target of the teasing laughing too, or is it more of a bullying of the target, albeit, verbally? Dec 4, 2014 at 14:44
  • Assuming that this attention is unwanted, I think "bully" is appropriate. "Verbal bully" if you want to be more specific. Don't dress it up in with obscure terms.
    – Hot Licks
    Dec 5, 2014 at 4:44

9 Answers 9

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bullying or harassment.

From wikipedia entry on bullying:

Behaviors used to assert such domination can include verbal harassment or threat, physical assault or coercion, and such acts may be directed repeatedly towards particular targets

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A common idiom is:

  • make fun of somebody, also poke fun at somebody:

    • to make someone seem ridiculous by making jokes about them When she first moved north, some people made fun of her southern accent.

(from TFD)

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Take the mickey

-Tease or make fun of

Also sometimes 'take the piss'

See this link for more.

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Give someone a hard time

This can be used if the persons in question all know each other and the teasing is meant to be fun rather than harassing someone.

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In the US, someone who does so is a bully, for both verbal and physical forms.

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Such a person (in Britain) is a wind-up merchant often abbreviated on the internet to WUM.

Notes

  1. 'wind' /waind/ is a verb. See the idiom 'to wind someone up'.

  2. I don't know if the idiom is used in the US.

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One lively idiomatic term is razz, which Robert Chapman & Barbara Kipfer, Dictionary of American Slang, fourth edition (2007) defines as follows:

razz v To insult and ridicule; NEEDLE ["To nag at someone; criticize regularly and smartingly"], RIDE ["To tease, heckle, make fun of"] : Is there ever any razzing about the fact that you report to your wife? {1920+; fr[om] raspberry ["A rude and contemptuous expulsion of breath through vibrating lips"]; found in the form razoo by 1890}

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With the OP's "tease" in mind, I'm going to propose the word josh.

Josh: (verb) "Tease (someone) in a playful way. He loved to josh people" (Oxford Dictionaries).

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Pester could work! Its definition (according to Merriam-Webster Online is "to harass with petty irritations : annoy."

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  • The definition "to harass with petty irritations" seems to have come from definition 2 of Merriam-Webster's entry for pester ("to harass with petty irritations : annoy"). I have added a link to that page of the MW site and credited the source in your answer. In future answers at this site, please include such citations. Thanks!
    – Sven Yargs
    Feb 27, 2017 at 5:46

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