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• dolly
  dolly

  noun

  a doll.
• Dolly
  Dolly

  noun

  a female given name, form of Doll.

dolly

¹ American  

[dol-ee] / ˈdɒl i /

noun

• dollies
  plural

1. Informal. a doll.

2. a low truck or cart with small wheels for moving loads too heavy to be carried by hand.

3. Movies, Television. a small wheeled platform, usually having a short boom, on which a camera can be mounted for making moving shots.

4. Machinery. a tool for receiving and holding the head of a rivet while the other end is being headed.

5. a block placed on the head of a pile being driven to receive the shock of the blows.

6. a small locomotive operating on narrow-gauge tracks, especially in quarries, construction sites, etc.

7. a short, wooden pole with a hollow dishlike base for stirring clothes while laundering them.

8. Slang. a tablet of Dolophine.

9. Also called dolly bird.  British Informal. an attractive girl or young woman.

10. (sometimes initial capital letter) an affectionate or familiar term of address, as to a child or romantic partner (sometimes offensive when used to strangers, casual acquaintances, subordinates, etc., especially by a male to a female).

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verb (used with object)

• dollies,
  present (3rd person singular)
• dollied,
  past participle,  past
• dollying
  present participle

1. to transport or convey (a camera) by means of a dolly.

verb (used without object)

• dollies,
  present (3rd person singular)
• dollied,
  past participle,  past
• dollying
  present participle

1. to move a camera on a dolly, especially toward or away from the subject being filmed or televised (often followed by in orout ).

   to dolly in for a close-up.

Dolly ² American  

[dol-ee] / ˈdɒl i /

Or Dollie

noun

1. a female given name, form of Doll.

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dolly British  

/ ˈdɒlɪ /

noun

1. a child's word for a doll

2. films television a wheeled support on which a camera may be mounted

3. a cup-shaped anvil held against the head of a rivet while the other end is being hammered

4. a shaped block of lead used to hammer dents out of sheet metal

5. a distance piece placed between the head of a pile and the pile-driver to form an extension to the length of the pile

6. cricket a simple catch

7. Also called: dolly bird.  slang an attractive and fashionable girl, esp one who is considered to be unintelligent

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verb

1. films television to wheel (a camera) backwards or forwards on a dolly

Dolly Cultural  

1. The first mammal successfully cloned — Dolly, a sheep — was born in 1996 in Scotland as the result of work by biologist Ian Wilmut (see clone). The procedure that produced Dolly involved removing the nucleus from an egg cell and placing the nucleus of an adult sheep's mammary cell into it. Further manipulations caused the egg to “turn on” all genes and develop like a normal zygote. (See totipotency.)

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Other Word Forms

Inflected Forms

Nouns

• dollies
  plural

Participles

• dollying
  present
• dollied
  past

Conjugated Forms

Present

• dolly
  simple
• dollies
  simple
• have dollied
  perfect
• has dollied
  perfect
• am dollying
  progressive
• are dollying
  progressive
• is dollying
  progressive
• have been dollying
  perfect progressive
• has been dollying
  perfect progressive

Past

• dollied
  simple
• had dollied
  perfect
• was dollying
  progressive
• were dollying
  progressive
• had been dollying
  perfect progressive

Future

• will dolly
  simple
• will have dollied
  perfect
• will be dollying
  progressive
• will have been dollying
  perfect progressive

Etymology

Origin of dolly

1600–10; 1900–05 dolly for def. 9; doll + -y ²

Explanation

A dolly is a cart with wheels and a long handle used for moving heavy objects. Instead of carrying one box at a time, stack them on a dolly and wheel them all to the van at once. A dolly is an L-shaped device with a flat base that slides easily underneath a box or piece of furniture. Tilt the dolly back on its wheels, and it's fairly simple to transport things, even if they're too heavy for you to lift. Another meaning of dolly is "doll," as in a child's toy that looks like a little person: "Give your brother back his dolly!"

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

dolly Dolly dollies dollied dollying

It’s telling that while Mr. Deakins takes pains to praise his longtime gaffer, key grip, dolly grip, best boy and more, he never bothers to define those roles for the lay reader.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 13, 2026

Brook can be excused for his flying drop of Jamal at gully, but Shoaib Bashir’s miss of the same man at long leg was a dolly.

From BBC ● Oct. 10, 2024

But, Eisenberg said, the scenes where they could ditch the dolly and just follow Culkin “sparkled.”

From Seattle Times ● Jan. 19, 2024

There is a dolly that tracked from the apartment to where the Uber comes and then back to the apartment again.

From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 21, 2023

Arthur is still sitting at the radio listening to Amos ’n’ Andy, not even paying attention to Sonny and Henry, who are tearing apart Jimmie’s dolly.

From "Betty Before X" by Ilyasah Shabazz and Renée Watson

The company tried to lean into its loyalty program and a partnership with Dolly Parton.

From MarketWatch ● Jul. 28, 2026

District Judge Dolly M. Gee scolded a pair of government attorneys from her bench in Los Angeles, signaling she would probably appoint a new special master to force compliance with the settlement agreement.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 24, 2026

AI in its current form limits production quality, noted non-binary Filipina filmmaker Dolly Dulu.

From Barron's ● Jun. 30, 2026

A quaint—and very quirky—California property that once served as music legend Dolly Parton’s private hideaway has returned to the market for just a hair under $2 million.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 24, 2026

I was listening to a popular program called “Rediffusion Service,” which featured most of the countiy’s leading African singers: Miriam Makeba, Dolly Rathebe, Dorothy Masuku, Thoko Shukuma, and the smooth sound of the Manhattan Brothers.

From "Long Walk to Freedom" by Nelson Mandela

And then they introduced camping, and we had to haul all of our bags from the car lot with dollies to our campsite.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 22, 2026

A very soft dismissal too, as he dollies up a return catch to Colin Ingram's part-time leg-spin.

From BBC ● Apr. 7, 2024

There’s a garden where goats pull 18th-century aristocrats on dollies, and a town square where gnomes drink beer and a ginormous rat plays the accordion.

From New York Times ● Dec. 3, 2021

Multiple dollies on rails transfer cars across 266 stalls in levels B2 to B9.

From Seattle Times ● Jul. 20, 2021

We played basketball and made my dollies and their dresses.

From "March Forward, Girl" by Melba Pattillo Beals

Liam Dawson was trapped plumb in front and Ryan Higgins dollied a catch to backward point as Spirit's batters tried and failed to get to grips with the top T20 wicket-taker of all time.

From BBC ● Aug. 5, 2025

Though it was also a thrill when you dollied in on films like the world’s top box-office hit of 2020, a title that had never made it through the walls of my particular media silo.

From Slate ● Jan. 1, 2021

Double was on hand Tuesday as the Möller was delivered from a Lithonia organ builder and dollied back to center stage.

From Washington Times ● Dec. 20, 2020

Then on the Serb’s serve in what he must have thought were the concluding moments of his work for the day, Djokovic dollied the most complacent of drop shots a tad long.

From The Guardian ● Jun. 5, 2015

Standard cinema technique is to use only one camera, which is dollied forward or backward for each different shot.

From Time Magazine Archive

The speech is executed in one take, with the camera dollying side to side as well as forward and backward, to capture all of Wright’s beats.

From New York Times ● Jun. 16, 2023

The camera stays still for the most part, dollying in a bit now and again, panning with robotic precision to take in a vista.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 30, 2017

The camera is shaking, shifting, rolling, zooming, dollying, fragmenting his performance to the point where it's pulverized, like a mirror broken into a thousand tiny pieces and then crushed into powder.

From Salon ● Feb. 24, 2011

The Louisville Lip just laughed and laughed as he conjured up the fight scene: a jampacked, 150,000-seat stadium, roving searchlights, TV cameras dollying in.

From Time Magazine Archive

In dollying it generally pays to burn the stone, as so much labour in crushing is thus saved.

From Getting Gold: a practical treatise for prospectors, miners and students by J. C. F. (Joseph Colin Frances) Johnson