Definition
To do something that has a risk of going catastrophically wrong.
To annoy an irritable person.
Origins
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.
In Context
- "Climbing so close to an erupting volcano was tickling the dragon's tail."
- "Don't tell him the headline's misprinted; you don't want to tickle the dragon's tail."