drawl

/dɹɔːl/US/dɹɔl/

drawl verb: to drag on slowly and heavily; to dawdle or while away time indolently.

Verb

drawl (third-person singular simple present drawls, present participle drawling, simple past and past participle drawled)

(transitive) To drag on slowly and heavily; to dawdle or while away time indolently.
(transitive) To utter or pronounce in a dull, spiritless tone, as if by dragging out the utterance.
(intransitive) To move slowly and heavily; to move in a dull, slow, lazy manner.
- Tush, tush, Tarleton, Kemp, nor Singer, nor all the litter of Fooles that now come drawling behinde them, neuer plaid the Clownes more naturally then the arrantest Sot of you all, shall, if hee will but boyle my Instructions in his brainepan.1609, Thomas Dekker, The guls horne-booke, pages 3-4
- Looke what leysure the old bearded Bawd takes / How softly she goes / How one leg comes drawling after another / Now she has her money, her armes are broken.1631, Fernando de Rojas, The Spanish bavvd, represented in Celestina …, page 36
(intransitive) To speak with a slow, spiritless utterance, as from affectation, laziness, or lack of interest.
- talk sometimes a pestilence , and sometimes a hero , mostly in a drawling and dreaming way about it1828, Walter Savage Landor, “Lord Brooke and Sir Philip Sidney”, in Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen, volume III, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC

Noun

drawl (plural drawls)

A way of speaking slowly while lengthening vowel sounds and running words together, characteristic of some Southern US accents, as well as Broad Australian, Broad New Zealand, and Scots.

drawl meaning in Malayalam and Kannada

drawl in Malayalam

ഇഴച്ചുവലിച്ചു സംസാരിക്കുക, മന്ദമായി സംസാരിക്കുക, നീട്ടി സംസാരിക്കുക

Examples of drawl in a sentence

"Not that way," Severus Snape drawled from the front passenger seat.
Still facing the mirror, he drawled, ‘Look what the cat's dragged in.
When drawled out by a hundred throats the phrase "I-wanter-know!" always produces a laugh.

All 20 example sentences with drawl

Forms of drawl

Verb
third-person singular present	drawls
present participle	drawling
past participle	drawled
past	drawled
Noun
plural	drawls

Past tense of drawl: drawled

Origin of drawl

From a modern frequentative form of draw, equivalent to draw + -le. Compare draggle. Compare also Dutch dralen (“to drag out, delay, linger, tarry, dawdle”), Old Danish dravle (“to linger, loiter”), Icelandic dralla (“to loiter, linger”).

Words formed from drawl

Words that rhyme with drawl

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about drawl

What does drawl mean?: Drawl means to drag on slowly and heavily; to dawdle or while away time indolently.
What is drawl in Malayalam?: Drawl in Malayalam is ഇഴച്ചുവലിച്ചു സംസാരിക്കുക, മന്ദമായി സംസാരിക്കുക, നീട്ടി സംസാരിക്കുക. See Drawl meaning in Malayalam.
What part of speech is drawl?: Drawl can be a verb or a noun.
How do you pronounce drawl?: Drawl is pronounced /dɹɔːl/ (UK).
What is the past tense of drawl?: The past tense of drawl is drawled.

Words near drawl in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: drawl (page history and authors); drawl (Malayalam Wiktionary) (page history and authors); drawl (Kannada Wiktionary) (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: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-drawl.wav.

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