Word.ws English Dictionary

dawdling

dawdling is the gerund of dawdle.

dawdling is the present participle and gerund of dawdle.

Meaning of dawdle

Noun

dawdle (plural dawdles)

  1. An act of spending time idly and unfruitfully; a dawdling.
  2. An act of moving or walking lackadaisically, a dawdling; a leisurely or slow walk or other journey.
    • For many the journey home from school was not a walk but a ‘dawdle’: it was an everyday experience that added meaning to their lives.2017, Colin G. Pooley, Jean Turnbull, Mags Adams, “Travelling to School”, in A Mobile Century?: Changes in Everyday Mobility in Britain in the Twentieth Century, Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, →ISBN
  3. Synonym of dawdler (“a person who dawdles or idles”).
    • Lord, I have ſuch a deal to do, I ſhall ſcarce have time to ſlip on my Italian luteſting.—VVhere is this davvdle of a houſekeeper?1766, George Colman, David Garrick, The Clandestine Marriage, a Comedy. […], London: […] T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, […]; R[oberts] Baldwin, […]; R. Davis, […]; and T[homas] Davies, […], →OCLC, Act...
    Synonyms:
    dawdler

See all 6 meanings of dawdle

Forms of dawdling

pluraldawdlings

Origin of dawdling

From dawdle + -ing.

Questions about dawdling

What is dawdling the gerund of?
Dawdling is the gerund of dawdle.

Words near dawdling in the dictionary

  1. dawdlers
  2. dawdles
  3. dawdlesome
  4. dawdlest
  5. dawdleth
  6. dawdling
  7. dawdlingly
  8. dawdlings
  9. Dawdon
  10. dawds
  11. Dawdy

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dawdling (page history and authors); dawdle (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “dawdling.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dawdling. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.