# tickle the dragon's tail

> English word · Verb

## Definitions
1. To do something that has a risk of going catastrophically wrong.
2. To annoy an irritable person.
3. To bring two subcritical masses close together in order to find the edge of criticality.

## Etymology
From the obvious risk of tickling a dragon's tail. In physics, it was coined by American physicist Richard Feynman to describe the experiments of Louis Slotin at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

## Source
Compiled from Wiktionary via kaikki.org (CC BY-SA). Data vintage: 2026-05-06.
Canonical page: https://plainspell.com/en/word/tickle-the-dragon-s-tail