fribble
Americanverb (used without object)
verb (used with object)
noun
-
a foolish or frivolous person; trifler.
-
anything trifling or frivolous.
adjective
verb
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(tr) to fritter away; waste
-
(intr) to act frivolously; trifle
noun
adjective
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of fribble
First recorded in 1620–30; perhaps alteration of frivol
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
It was a fribble thing called French Without Tears, but the customers liked it.
From Time Magazine Archive
The irony is that all this fluff and fribble are arriving just as more women are getting serious about wine.
From Time Magazine Archive
In the film Brummell is at one moment a fribble fellow who orders his dressing gown to match his sheets and his boots buffed with champagne.
From Time Magazine Archive
But during his four-day visit to Washington last week, the Prince kept the flirting to a fribble.
From Time Magazine Archive
The Dunciad, the most marked critical work of the period, may be defended on the ground that it is the Dunciad; a war waged by genius upon the fool, the pedant, and the fribble.
From English literary criticism by Various
These three years in Ely Place Cowper fribbled away agreeably enough.
From Res Judicat? Papers and Essays by Birrell, Augustine
The children fribbled about us while we talked away the afternoon.
From The Boss of Little Arcady by Wilson, Harry Leon
Deprived of its influence, a painter could go off the rails and become a fribbling hack, a "strappazone," he wrote in Paris, "like all the others who are here."
From Time Magazine Archive
Humiliated by these reverses, with their prestige diminished and threatened with an ignominious fall, the fribbling authors of the war expected to save everything by substituting another chief for Wullenweber.
From Bartholomew Sastrow Being the Memoirs of a German Burgomaster by Sastrow, Bartholomew
In this tract we find no unmeaning gallant fribbling, but the solemn language of one who had death and judgment before his face.
From Works of John Bunyan — Volume 02 by Bunyan, John
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
