Q: What is tuck pointing?

A: It's a masonry term, and it's actually tuckpointing, one word. It's a style of low-cost brickwork developed in the late Victorian age in England, specifically to mimic much more expensive rubbed-brick masonry. Rubbed-brick was a method of cutting bricks to precise smooth faces and using a small amount of mortar between bricks, making a very small, very sharp looking line. Tuckpointing imitates this look by using two colors of mortar, one of which matches the bricks themselves almost exactly, and another (usually white) that draws a fine line between the bricks in order to create the illusion of much tighter spacing.

Apparently the term has come to mean reapplying mortar or making repairs to chimneys, mainly in the US and Canada.