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• drabble
  drabble

  verb (used with or without object)

  to draggle; make or become wet and dirty.
• Drabble
  Drabble

  noun

  Dame Margaret, born 1939, English novelist, short-story writer, and biographer (sister ofA. S. Byatt ).

drabble

¹ American  

[drab-uhl] / ˈdræb əl /

verb (used with or without object)

drabbled, drabbling

1. to draggle; make or become wet and dirty.

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Drabble ² American  

[drab-uhl] / ˈdræb əl /

noun

1. Dame Margaret, born 1939, English novelist, short-story writer, and biographer (sister ofA. S. Byatt ).

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Drabble ¹ British  

/ ˈdræbəl /

noun

1. Dame Margaret. born 1939, British novelist and editor. Her novels include The Needle's Eye (1972), The Radiant Way (1987), and The Seven Sisters (2002). She edited the 1985 edition of the Oxford Companion to Literature

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drabble ² British  

/ ˈdræbəl /

verb

1. to make or become wet or dirty

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Etymology

Origin of drabble

1350–1400; Middle English drabelen < Middle Low German drabbeln to wade in liquid mud, bespatter, equivalent to drabbe liquid mud + -eln frequentative v. suffix; see drab ², draff

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

drabble Drabble drabbled drabbling

In the most memorable drabble to date, Perkins evidently struck a nerve among listeners by autobiographically focusing on her insecurities about her teeth and her kissing technique in her fictional romance with Jake Gyllenhaal.

From Slate ● Jun. 18, 2018

Why don't you say that Lew Alcindor plays "dribble drabble," and Johnny Unitas "punt punt"?

From Time Magazine Archive

Looking out on a landscape that was like a Christmas card, and remembering the drabble and jangle of the town, we were not sorry to be among the clean white hills.

From Dwellers in Arcady The Story of an Abandoned Farm by Thomas Fogarty

There was a drabble of dead leaves on the sidewalk which was of wood, and on the roadway which was of macadam and stiff mud.

From Stories of a Western Town by Octave Thanet

The other forms, such as drabbe, dregg, and dragan, the b and v being analogous to E. draggle, drabble, draught, draft, all equally from dragan.

From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 34, August, 1860 by Various

The author was born Antonia Susan Drabble on Aug. 24, 1936, and published her first novel, “The Shadow of a Sun,” in 1964.

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 17, 2023

She was the sister of the novelist Margaret Drabble, and the siblings drew parallels with the Brontes, a comparison they tended to spurn.

From Reuters ● Nov. 17, 2023

"We have got two fantastic bays and then someone comes along and wants to poison our waters," as Drabble puts it.

From BBC ● Feb. 14, 2022

SALISBURY, England — On a recent Saturday afternoon, Margaret Drabble, 83, sat beneath the soaring arches of Salisbury Cathedral, swinging her legs back and forth under her chair like a schoolgirl.

From New York Times ● Jan. 25, 2021

Uncle Max might invite the bishop to dine, but if his lordship chose to be late Mrs. Drabble would take no pains to keep her dinner hot.

From Uncle Max by Rosa Nouchette Carey

The half-dozen drabbled dragons pranced and writhed and reared proudly.

From Time Magazine Archive

Rivulets of thick, muddy liquid welled out of the ground and drabbled their feet.

From Collector's Item by Evelyn E. Smith

And here let me add, that the women were always well dressed: there were no party dresses, all shine, lace and glitter, and household wrappers all slouched, torn and drabbled.

From Brook Farm Historic and Personal Memoirs by John Thomas Codman

What on earth do you suppose made those girls come up here in white dresses, blowing about in the wind, and already drabbled?

From Their Pilgrimage by Charles Dudley Warner

Then coaxings for Dorrie, sharp directions for Sybil, and—and somehow they were standing in a street, dazzled by the sunlight, sick and faint and dirty and drabbled, but out in the pure air once more.

From A Pasteboard Crown A Story of the New York Stage by Clara Morris

Slowly he raised his head and saw her, only a few paces away, eyeing him, her beak drabbling a spittle of venom, and a green ooze trickling from below her wounded eye.

From "The Two Towers" by J. R. R. Tolkien

Now, why am I compelled to wear long petticoats drabbling in the mud, when a Bavarian may wear hers up to the knees, and nobody think the worse of her?

From Flora Lyndsay or, Passages in an Eventful Life by Susanna Moodie

They had got tired and gone to secluded corners, or to their rooms, or drabbling into the village.

From The Car That Went Abroad Motoring Through the Golden Age by Albert Bigelow Paine

I cared nothing for the wet grass, which was sadly drabbling my clean frock,—on and on I ran: I was so sure that I knew just where that rainbow ended.

From McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader by William Holmes McGuffey

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