Trickle

How to spell trickle

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce trickle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does trickle mean?

1. verbTo flow or fall slowly in a thin stream or in drops.
2. nounA small, thin flow of liquid, or a slow gradual movement of something.

Trickle in a sentence

• verb

  Rainwater began to trickle down the bedroom window.

• noun

  The broken tap left only a thin trickle of water in the sink.

• verb

  Sweat started to trickle along the back of his neck during the meeting.

• noun

  The steady stream of orders slowed to a mere trickle after the holidays.

Where does trickle come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

Trickle first appears in Middle English as triklen, recorded around the late 1300s, and its origin is genuinely murky. The most widely accepted view is that it is imitative, an echoic coinage meant to capture the soft, intermittent sound of small drops falling or seeping. Some scholars have suggested instead that it is a shortened or altered form of an older word like striklen, meaning to flow or drip, which would tie it loosely to the family of strike and streak. The earliest uses describe tears running down a face, and only later did it broaden to any thin, slow flow of liquid and then to the figurative sense of things arriving gradually, as in money or news. Because no clear parent word survives, dictionaries usually label the etymology uncertain, which is why the spelling has no helpful Latin or French root to lean on; the doubled c and the -le ending simply have to be memorised.

How the word is built

• trickle (Middle English triklen, of imitative origin)
• no affixes; the base verb stands alone