tootle
Americanverb (used without object)
-
to toot gently or repeatedly on a flute or the like.
-
to move or proceed in a leisurely way.
noun
verb
noun
verb
noun
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of tootle
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:
In the end it would be Boxing Day 2021, three months later, before he could return to the Forest of Dean, and "tootle down" the track where he'd injured himself.
From BBC ● Aug. 24, 2025
Up the river we tootle, our pirate-garbed captain pointing out landmarks along the way.
From Washington Post ● Nov. 7, 2019
Most of the time, you will just tootle around town with it, doing really simple things.
From The Verge ● Dec. 19, 2018
As a native Chicagoan who has watched the Rams tootle around UC Irvine in their golf carts, I have to wonder what Dick Butkus would say if he saw them.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 3, 2017
During the night, some of the locomotives began to tootle to one another, and then to move.
From "Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut
Dash responded with the message “Yay!” and a winsome shimmy, then tootled off at one and a half miles an hour—maybe in search of someone’s job.
From The New Yorker ● Nov. 19, 2018
I didn’t play on the A side, but I played bass on the B side while my uncle tootled along on harp.
From Salon ● Nov. 30, 2015
Not so long ago, Americans who tootled around foreign countries in athletic attire earned a tourist badge of dishonor.
From Washington Post ● Aug. 6, 2015
After dinner on a warmish weeknight—57 degrees in Ann Arbor—a junior picked up his trumpet and tootled a bit of Glenn Miller from his window, just to relax.
From Slate ● May 9, 2013
A man sat on the steps of the trading post and tootled a lively tune on a pakila, or panpipes.
From "A Girl Named Disaster" by Nancy Farmer
Upstairs, Zella Powers, 85, worked on one of the library’s public computers, just reading the news, tootling around, one of a few dozen people a day who come to use the library’s internet.
From Seattle Times ● Aug. 13, 2023
"They're more than happy for him to be tootling along behind them in his chair."
From BBC ● Mar. 6, 2023
Angela Lansbury is a tweedy country eccentric in wartime England, tootling around on a bronchitic sidecar motorbike and receiving mysterious parcels from a professor in London.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 12, 2022
And what a renewal it was: roaring whales, bellowing elephants, tootling children and moaning freight trains.
From Scientific American ● Mar. 24, 2022
He looked at the merry-go-round tootling behind me.
From "Milkweed" by Jerry Spinelli
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.
