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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

The look of them clutched one's heart with horror and despair, as if one looked on a once lovely mother turned to a street drabble.

From Still Jim by Honoré Morrow

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

Mr Drabble said: "You don't need money for the dream wedding."

From BBC ● May 11, 2023

Their readers form a surprisingly wide-reaching bunch, and include the novelist Margaret Drabble and the “His Dark Materials” author Philip Pullman.

From New York Times ● Feb. 3, 2022

Nierenstein considers this reaction analogous to the formation of cork, to the genetic relation of which with the diphenylmethane formation Drabble and Nierenstein have referred in an earlier publication.

From Synthetic Tannins by Georg Grasser

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

From Time Magazine Archive

A huge fire blazed upon the ample hearth, before which were spread several staff uniforms, whose drabbled and soaked appearance denoted the reason of the party's change of habiliments.

From Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 by Charles James Lever

Whenever Plooie saw the drabbled little worker busy on a doorstep, he would cross over and open the conversation according to an invariable formula.

From From a Bench in Our Square by Samuel Hopkins Adams

Dangling from a jagged piece of rock half way down the cliff, we found Polly Mathers's coat, torn and drabbled with mud.

From The Four Pools Mystery by Jean Webster

The drabbled plume of my hat swept the water, and I heard Labarthe curse under his breath, and beg me remember that the canoe was laden.

From Montlivet by Alice Prescott Smith

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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