teaser

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun One that teases, as a device for teasing wool.
• noun One who engages in teasing; a tease.
• noun A puzzling problem.
• noun An advertisement that attracts customers by offering something extra or free.
• noun Slang An attention-getting vignette or highlight, as one presented before the start of a television show.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun One who or that which teases: as, a teaser of oakum.
• noun The stoker or fireman in glassworks who attends the furnace.
• noun A dog used in hunting deer.
• noun Anything which teases, or causes trouble or annoyance.
• noun An inferior stallion or ram used to excite mares or ewes, but not allowed to serve them.
• noun A gull-teaser: a sailors' and fishermen's name of sundry predatory birds of the family Laridæ and subfamily Stercorariinæ, as a skua. Also called boatswain, marlinespike, and dung-hunter. See cuts under skua and Stercorarius.
• noun A name applied by Brush to a magnetizing coil on the field-magnets of his dynamo, the ends of which were connected to the terminals of the machine so as to form an independent circuit with the coil of the armature; the shunt coil in a compound wound dynamo.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun One who teases or vexes.
• noun (Zoöl.), Prov. Eng. A jager gull.
• noun (Elec.) A shunt winding on field magnets for maintaining their magnetism when the main circuit is open.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun A person or thing that teases
• noun A short film or quote meant to draw an audience to a film or show.
• noun UK, dialect A kind of gull, the jaeger.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun a device for teasing wool
• noun a worker who teases wool
• noun an advertisement that offers something free in order to arouse customers' interest
• noun a flat at each side of the stage to prevent the audience from seeing into the wings
• noun an attention-getting opening presented at the start of a television show
• noun someone given to teasing (as by mocking or stirring curiosity)
• noun a particularly baffling problem that is said to have a correct solution