Word.ws English Dictionary

tootle

/ˈtuːtəl/

tootle verb: to make a soft toot sound.

Verb

tootle (third-person singular simple present tootles, present participle tootling, simple past and past participle tootled)

  1. (intransitive) To make a soft toot sound.
    • Now the scythe the morn salutes,
      In the meadow tinkling soon;
      While on mellow-tootling flutes
      Sweetly breathes the shepherd’s tune.1820, John Clare, “Summer Morning”, in Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, London: Taylor and Hessey, page 145
    • We know the old lady is upstairs and that she is quite alone in the house and therefore it would be perfectly useless for her to tootle on her bedroom bell.1928, Fred M. White, chapter 27, in The Grey Woman
  2. (transitive) To play (a musical instrument) making such a sound.
    • A young, fresh-faced man, sitting by the driver, tootled a tandem horn.1917, Horace Annesley Vachell, chapter 11, in Fishpingle: A Romance of the Countryside, New York: George H. Doran, page 204
    • […] Cecil can tootle a pretty fair sax, at that, if the play happens to come up.1933, Damon Runyon, “Broadway Complex”, in Runyon from First to Last
  3. (colloquial, intransitive) To go (somewhere); to amble aimlessly.
    • I suppose we’d better tootle back to the ballroom.1933, Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Queen’s Square”, in A Treasury of Sayers Stories, London: Gollancz, published 1958, page 48
    • ‘When my old bike comes I shall tootle up and down the drive! Some swank!’1949, Elsie J. Oxenham, chapter 8, in The Abbey Girls Go Back to School, London: Collins
  4. (colloquial, transitive) To transport (someone somewhere).
    • […] he would just see if his shover had enough in the tank to tootle them down to Warborough […]1911, Agnes and Egerton Castle, chapter 1, in The Composer, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, page 4
    • Say I pick you up and tootle you over with your hens.1953, Angela Thirkell, chapter 3, in Jutland Cottage

Noun

tootle (plural tootles)

  1. A soft toot sound.
    • No one, least of all those with a musical ear, can take a form or even read a book in close proximity to the ineffectual tootle of a flute, the maddening squeaks of a raw fiddler, or the spasmodic grunts of a euphonium.1891, Thirteen Essays on Education, London: Percival & Co., E. W. Howson, “The Teaching of Music in Public Schools,” p. 37
    • The glamour of the sawdust world, the cheers of the crowd, the smell of hot dogs and cotton candy, the blare and tootle of the midway—he envied the gypsy family, here today and gone tomorrow.1958, Eleanor Reindollar Wilcox, chapter 7, in Mr. Sims’ Argosy, New York: Dodd, Mead, page 121
  2. (colloquial) A trip or excursion.
    • In between, is Granny May’s only daughter Juliet. A wonderful character who still joins me on the odd tootle.1979, Oliver Reed, chapter 4, in Reed All About Me, London: Hodder & Stoughton, published 1981, page 62
    • On weekends you can take a short tootle over to itsy-bitsy Pelican Island on a free ferry […]2008, Adam Karlin, “Miami & The Keys”, in Publications, Lonely Planet, page 63

Proper noun capitalized: Tootle

Tootle (plural Tootles)

  1. A surname.

Examples of tootle in a sentence

  • During the night, some of the locomotives began to tootle to one another, and then to move.1969 March 31, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., chapter 3, in Slaughterhouse-Five […] (A Seymour Lawrence Book), New York, N.Y.: Delacorte Press, →OCLC:
  • I was about to go, I thought I’d tootle down to the Coleherne perhaps, then I wouldn’t be too far away if the bleep went.1988, Alan Hollinghurst, chapter 10, in The Swimming-Pool Library, paperback edition, London: Penguin Books, →ISBN, page 221:
  • One blast [of the trumpet], and [the sheep] would go here, two and they would go there, some tootles and they would run up the hill, a high note and they would stop short […]2009, Mark Helprin, chapter 5, in Digital Barbarism, HarperCollins, page 170:

Forms of tootle

Verb
third-person singular presenttootles
present participletootling
past participletootled
pasttootled
Noun
pluraltootles
Proper noun
pluralTootles

Origin of tootle

From toot + -le, frequentative.

Words formed from tootle

Words that rhyme with tootle

Questions about tootle

What does tootle mean?
Tootle means to make a soft toot sound.
How do you use tootle in a sentence?
During the night, some of the locomotives began to tootle to one another, and then to move.
What part of speech is tootle?
Tootle can be a verb, a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce tootle?
Tootle is pronounced /ˈtuːtəl/.
What is the past tense of tootle?
The past tense of tootle is tootled.

Words near tootle in the dictionary

  1. tootin'
  2. tooting
  3. Tooting Bec
  4. tooting one's own horn
  5. tootings
  6. tootle
  7. tootled
  8. tootler
  9. tootlers
  10. tootles
  11. tootling

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tootle (page history and authors); Tootle (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.

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

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