spuddled

Verb

spuddle (third-person singular simple present spuddles, present participle spuddling, simple past and past participle spuddled)

1. To loosen and dig up stubble and weeds left after a harvest with a broadshare or similar device.
   • Do you shim those stubbles before ploughing? Answer. No; but I spuddle them, to make the ground as clean as possible. Spuddling is performed with the plough, and is of the nature of shiming.1785, Arthur Young, Annals of Agriculture and Other Useful Arts, volume 4, page 230
2. (broadly, dialectal) To shallowly dig or stir up in an unsystematic manner.
   • Instead of an "occasional gardener" to trim up the walks, and to hoe, your wife will be as happy as a queen, and your daughters as princesses, to spuddle about now and then, and have little flower gardens, and herb beds.1829 August 15, William Cobbett, “To the Farmers of England, On the Causes of their present Distress, and on the Remedies for the same.”, in Cobbett's Weekly Political Register, volume 67, page 207
3. (Southern-England, obsolete) To make a lot of fuss about trivial things, as if they were important
   • During all the years that I spuddled around in a porcelain bath tub in a city I was given to regarding the farmer somewhat as the caricaturist, who wears his spring overcoat all winter and sells jokes for 10 cents each to the newspapers, painted him.1902, Met Lawson Saley, Realm of the Retailer, page 336
4. (obsolete) To work ineffectively; to work hard but achieve nothing
   • In what glooın are you all left to spuddle out your way through the road of life?1780, Mrs. Gunning (Susannah), Margaret Minifie, The Count de Poland - Volume 4, page 249

See all 8 meanings of spuddle