Word.ws English Dictionary

noodling

noodling noun: the practice and sport of fishing for catfish using the bare hands. Also the present participle and gerund of noodle.

Noun

noodling (countable and uncountable, plural noodlings)

  1. (uncountable) The practice and sport of fishing for catfish using the bare hands.
  2. (countable) Musical improvisation.
    • Unlike Basie's increasingly repetitious piano noodlings, Young's melodic gestures had a way of staying fresh and inventive.1991, Gunther Schuller, The swing era: the development of jazz, 1930-1945

Also used as

noodling is also the present participle and gerund of noodle.

Forms of noodling

pluralnoodlings

Words formed from noodling

Phrases with noodling

Questions about noodling

What does noodling mean?
Noodling means the practice and sport of fishing for catfish using the bare hands.
What part of speech is noodling?
Noodling is a noun.
What is the plural of noodling?
The plural of noodling is noodlings.

Words near noodling in the dictionary

  1. noodley
  2. noodlicious
  3. noodlier
  4. noodliest
  5. noodliness
  6. noodling
  7. noodling up
  8. noodlings
  9. noodly
  10. noodnick
  11. noodnicks

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: noodling (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-noodling.wav.

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