Word.ws English Dictionary

doddering

doddering adjective: mentally or physically infirm due to old age; senile. Also the present participle and gerund of dodder.

Adjective

doddering (not comparable)

  1. Mentally or physically infirm due to old age; senile.
    • You great fat, blasted, blear-eyed, blundering, thundering, brainless, God-forsaken, doddering, damned fool!1908, G[ilbert] K[eith] Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, Bristol: J[ames] W[illiams] Arrowsmith, […]; London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Company, →OCLC, page 212
    • Treat the doddering old fool with sympathy.1963, Thomas Pynchon, V., J. B. Lippincott & Co., →LCCN, →OCLC, page 241

Noun

doddering (plural dodderings)

  1. A shaking or trembling movement, as of old age.
    • Now that he was next in line to the minister of state security himself, an 82 year old man whose dodderings Fang graciously covered up to save everyone's face, Fang had a huge problem.2001, Seth Kohn, Escape on the Silk Road, page 7

Also used as

doddering is also the present participle and gerund of dodder.

Forms of doddering

pluraldodderings

Words formed from doddering

Questions about doddering

What does doddering mean?
Doddering means mentally or physically infirm due to old age; senile.
What part of speech is doddering?
Doddering can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near doddering in the dictionary

  1. dodderers
  2. Dodderhill
  3. dodderier
  4. dodderiest
  5. dodderiness
  6. doddering
  7. dodderingly
  8. dodderings
  9. dodders
  10. doddery
  11. doddie

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: doddering (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-us-doddering.oga.

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