Word.ws English Dictionary

dilly-dallying

dilly-dallying is the present participle and gerund of dilly-dally.

Meaning of dilly-dally

Verb

dilly-dally (third-person singular simple present dilly-dallies, present participle dilly-dallying, simple past and past participle dilly-dallied)

  1. (intransitive) To dawdle; to waste time; to procrastinate.
    • It is something to have been an old soldier, but more still to have been a doctor. There is no time to dilly-dally in our work.1881–1882, Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, London; Paris: Cassell & Company, published 14 November 1883, →OCLC

Questions about dilly-dallying

What is dilly-dallying the present participle and gerund of?
Dilly-dallying is the present participle and gerund of dilly-dally.

Words near dilly-dallying in the dictionary

  1. dilly-dallied
  2. dilly-dallier
  3. dilly-dalliers
  4. dilly-dallies
  5. dilly-dally
  6. dilly-dallying
  7. dillybag
  8. dillybags
  9. dillydallied
  10. dillydallier
  11. dillydalliers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dilly-dallying (page history and authors); dilly-dally (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: “dilly-dallying.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dilly-dallying. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.