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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

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

To befoul with rain and mud; to drabble.

From Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (2nd 100 Pages) by Noah Webster

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

“Oh, I just love the organ,” said Drabble, a former schoolteacher.

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

The light from across the street showed that it was a woman, dressed in shabby black, wearing a drabbled hat, decorated with a few miserable flowers.

From The Lucky Piece A Tale of the North Woods by Albert Bigelow Paine

Mis-shapen, distorted, blotched, drabbled and crimsoned, it spread away to the horizons, east and west, its scars showing under the rays of the sun which shone out from the mares' tails of the departing hurricane.

From The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men by Francis Rolt-Wheeler

The schoolboy hears and brushes through the trees And runs about till drabbled to the knees.

From Poems Chiefly from Manuscript by John Clare

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

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

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

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

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