Word.ws English Dictionary

doodly

doodly adjective: like a doodle; scribbly.

Adjective

doodly (comparative more doodly, superlative most doodly)

  1. Like a doodle; scribbly.
    • I chose a glazed pottery egg, partly because I liked the weight of it — heavy for its size — and because it sat so neatly in my hand, but mainly because I liked the strange doodly pattern drawn on it in greys and washed-out blues[…]2007, Aidan Chambers, This Is All, page 257

Noun

doodly (uncountable)

  1. Diddly; nothing
    • "Personally, I don't think these general referendum questions will do doodly to increase voter turnout," said Chicago Board of Election Commissioners spokesman Tom Leach.1988 March 11, John Holden, “Democracy with a small d: a plethora of referenda”, in Chicago Reader, archived from the original on 06 Mar 2016

Forms of doodly

comparativemore doodly
superlativemost doodly

Origin of doodly

From doodle + -y.

Words formed from doodly

Questions about doodly

What does doodly mean?
Doodly means like a doodle; scribbly.
What part of speech is doodly?
Doodly can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near doodly in the dictionary

  1. doodlesacks
  2. doodley
  3. doodley-squat
  4. doodling
  5. doodlings
  6. doodly
  7. doodly-squat
  8. doodoo
  9. doodoohead
  10. doodooheads
  11. doods

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: doodly (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: “doodly.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/doodly. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.