Doodle

How to spell doodle

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce doodle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does doodle mean?

1. verbTo scribble or draw absent-mindedly, often while thinking about something else.
2. nounA rough or aimless drawing made while a person's attention is elsewhere.

Doodle in a sentence

• verb

  He tends to doodle in the margins during long meetings.

• noun

  Every page of his planner had a small doodle in the corner.

• verb

  She likes to doodle little flowers while she waits on hold.

• noun

  The napkin was covered with a complicated doodle of spirals.

Where does doodle come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Doodle began life as a word for a fool or simpleton in early seventeenth century English, borrowed from Low German, where forms such as 'dudeltopf' and 'dudendop' described a silly or dull person. That older sense survives faintly in the eighteenth century song 'Yankee Doodle', where the name pokes fun at a country bumpkin. The modern meaning, to scribble or sketch aimlessly while the mind is elsewhere, did not appear until the early twentieth century and is recorded in popular use around the 1930s. The shift seems to come from the idea of an idler trifling away time, and the spelling may have been reinforced by 'dawdle', which means to waste time, and possibly by 'doodlesack', an old name for a bagpipe. The doubled o and the soft -le ending are the only real traps, since the word sounds exactly as it looks once you know it is two even syllables.

How the word is built

• doodle (single root, of Low German origin); no productive prefix or suffix