doodle
nounEtymology
Originally dialectal, from Low German dudeldopp (“simpleton”). Influenced by dawdle. Compare also German dudeln (“to play (the bagpipe)”). The word doodle first appeared in the early 17th century to mean a fool or simpleton. German variants of the etymon include Dudeltopf, Dudentopf, Dudenkopf, Dude and Dödel. American English dude may be a derivation of doodle. The meaning "fool, simpleton" is intended in the song title "Yankee Doodle", originally sung by British colonial troops prior to the American Revolutionary War. This is also the origin of the early eighteenth century verb to doodle, meaning "to swindle or to make a fool of". The modern meaning emerged in the 1930s either from this meaning or from the verb "to dawdle", which since the seventeenth century has had the meaning of wasting time or being lazy.
Definitions
A fool, a simpleton, a mindless person.
- Mrs. Sneak. Why doodle! jackanapes! harkee, who am I? Sneak. Come, don't go to call names: am I? vhy my vife, and I am your master.
- Perceval. Weep on! weep on! thou flouted loon, Weep on! weep on! thou gowky doodle!
- Courtier, it was thine to bow — Great Arthur he, and Doodle thou!
A small mindless sketch, etc.
The penis.
- His doodle hung as limp as last month's celery.
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To draw or scribble aimlessly.
- The bored student doodled a submarine in his notebook.
- The managing director doodled.
To engage in something non-seriously
To engage in something non-seriously; fiddle.
- I've been expecting women's music finally to discover New Wave and technopop, and this album is the evidence that someone has been peaking ^([sic]) at music videos and doodling around with sythesizers.
- I can tell you that he does indeed spend a lot of time on business and social calls, social chats, doodling around on AOL, and skimming the daily paper while those patients are piling up.
- For quite a long time now (at least the 1990s) people have been doodling with the idea of separating space and time again and perhaps endowing them with some properties currently not assigned to them.
To drone like a bagpipe.
Any crossbreed of a poodle with a different breed of dog.
The neighborhood
- neighbordoddle
- neighborfadoodle
- neighborflapdoodle
Vish — recursive loop
No curated loop yet for doodle. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.
sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA