fanny about
fanny about verb: to waste time or fool around; to engage in activity which produces little or no accomplishment.
Verb
fanny about (third-person singular simple present fannies about, present participle fannying about, simple past and past participle fannied about)
- To waste time or fool around; to engage in activity which produces little or no accomplishment.
- Then he dithered and fannied about.1977, Jon Fleming et al., Soldiers on Everest, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, page 97
- Johnson waited for an age while the barmen tossed bottles back and forth, poured luminous liquids into glasses from great heights, and fannied about with fruit and frivolities.2007, Philip Bryer, None of Your Business, →ISBN, page 151
- Synonyms:
- faff around, bum around, putter, fart around, beat the meat
- To wander about or prowl around.
- ... the mechanic who tidied up after the Krays, took care of business while the Twins were fannying around the clubland circuit.2001, Iain Sinclair, Landor's Tower, →ISBN, page 287
- Out of all the random cities one gets to fanny about in Europe, all my flings are descending onto Luxembourg like a plague of horny man-teens.2009 May 27, Lucy Hunt, “No more broken hearts?”, in iafrica.com, retrieved 08 Sep 2009
- Synonyms:
- bum around
Synonyms of fanny about
Forms of fanny about
| third-person singular present | fannies about |
|---|---|
| present participle | fannying about |
| past participle | fannied about |
| past | fannied about |
| alternative form | fanny around |
Questions about fanny about
- What does fanny about mean?
- Fanny about means to waste time or fool around; to engage in activity which produces little or no accomplishment.
- What part of speech is fanny about?
- Fanny about is a verb.
- What is the past tense of fanny about?
- The past tense of fanny about is fannied about.
Words near fanny about in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: fanny about (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-au-fanny about.ogg.
Cite this entry: “fanny about.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fanny_about. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.