Idle

How to spell idle

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce idle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does idle mean?

1. adjectiveNot active, not in use, or doing no work.
2. verbTo run an engine slowly while the vehicle stays still and does no work.

Idle in a sentence

• adjective

  The factory machines stood idle during the power cut.

• verb

  The driver let the van idle in the car park while she checked her phone.

• adjective

  He hated being idle between contracts and looked for short jobs.

• verb

  Leaving the engine to idle at the lights wastes fuel.

Where does idle come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes straight from the Old English idel, which meant 'empty', 'vain', or 'worthless', long before it settled on its modern sense of doing nothing. It belongs to a wider West Germanic family, with relatives such as the Dutch ijdel and the German eitel, both of which still carry the idea of 'vain' or 'empty'. The journey from 'empty' to 'not working' is easy to picture: an empty pair of hands is a pair of hands doing no useful work, so by the Middle Ages idle had come to describe a person who was unoccupied or lazy. The mechanical sense, an engine turning over without doing any work, only arrived with industry in the modern era and reuses that same notion of running while producing nothing. The spelling trap is purely aural: idle sounds exactly like the religious 'idol' and the poetic 'idyll', yet it keeps its own Germanic -dle ending that none of those Latin and Greek cousins share.

How the word is built

• idel (Old English: empty, useless)
• -le (now part of the stem)

Words that sound like idle

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• idol: A person who is greatly admired, loved, or revered, especially a celebrity or hero.