fuddle-duddle
fuddle-duddle verb: to depart, to be off.
Verb
fuddle-duddle (third-person singular simple present fuddle-duddles, present participle fuddle-duddling, simple past and past participle fuddle-duddled)
Interjection
Forms of fuddle-duddle
| third-person singular present | fuddle-duddles |
|---|---|
| present participle | fuddle-duddling |
| past participle | fuddle-duddled |
| past | fuddle-duddled |
Origin of fuddle-duddle
From fuddle, after fuddy-duddy, but development of meaning unclear. Perhaps from the interjection coined by Pierre Trudeau (see next etymology).
There is an example of the phrase's use in the early 1940s, in "Mother Finds a Body", by Gypsy Rose Lee: "...when [he] asks me where I was on the night of so-and-so, I'll tell him to go fuddle his duddle". However the expression fuddle-duddle is attributed to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, former prime minister of Canada, who according to some sources said it in parliament on 16 February 1971 and repeated it when pressed by television reporters about using profanity in respect to members of Parliament (Canadian House of Commons).
Questions about fuddle-duddle
- What does fuddle-duddle mean?
- Fuddle-duddle means to depart, to be off.
- What part of speech is fuddle-duddle?
- Fuddle-duddle can be a verb or an interjection.
- What is the past tense of fuddle-duddle?
- The past tense of fuddle-duddle is fuddle-duddled.
Words near fuddle-duddle in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: fuddle-duddle (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-fuddle-duddle.ogg.
Cite this entry: “fuddle-duddle.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fuddle-duddle. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.