doodle

Valid in Scrabble

Scrabble points
8
Words With Friends
9
Letters
6
Pronunciation
/ˈduːdl̩/
See all 2 pronunciations
/ˈduːdl̩/ · /ˈdud(ə)l/

Definition of doodle

7 senses · 2 parts of speech · etymology included

noun

  1. (obsolete)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!”
See all 7 definitions

noun

  1. (obsolete)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!”
  2. A small mindless sketch, etc.
  3. (childish, slang, sometimes)The penis.
    “His doodle hung as limp as last month's celery.”
    “Her favorite had been when she'd convinced the lascivious guards that Dinah's red hair meant she was a witch, and if they molested her, their doodles would shrivel up between their legs and fall off. Daisy had assured her that no man would risk losing his doodle.”
    “All of Dwight's parts wandered, especially his doodle. He had the wandering-est doodle in three states. His doodle had its own set of legs. His doodle was hardly at home. Heck, according to rumor Dwight Farris's doodle was hardly ever in his pants.”
  4. Any crossbreed of a poodle with a different breed of dog.

verb

  1. (ambitransitive)To draw or scribble aimlessly.
    “The bored student doodled a submarine in his notebook.”
    “The managing director doodled.”
  2. (intransitive)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.”
  3. (Scotland)To drone like a bagpipe.

Definitions from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA.

Etymology

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…

See full etymology

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.

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