tootle

See also: Tootle

English

Etymology

toot +‎ -le, frequentative.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈtuːtəl/

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

Verb

tootle (third-person singular simple present tootles, present participle tootling, simple past and past participle tootled)

1. (intransitive) To make a soft toot sound.
   • 1820, John Clare, “Summer Morning”, in Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery‎^[1], London: Taylor and Hessey, page 145:

     Now the scythe the morn salutes,
     In the meadow tinkling soon;
     While on mellow-tootling flutes
     Sweetly breathes the shepherd’s tune.

   • 1928, Fred M. White, chapter 27, in The Grey Woman‎^[2]:

     We know the old lady is upstairs and that she is quite alone in the house and therefore it would be perfectly useless for her to tootle on her bedroom bell.

   • 1936 June 30, Margaret Mitchell, chapter 9, in Gone with the Wind, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, →OCLC; republished New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, 1944, →OCLC:

     Their booth did not have so many customers as did the other booths where the tootling laugh of Maybelle Merriwether sounded and Fanny Elsing’s giggles and the Whiting girls’ repartee made merriment.

   • 1969 March 31, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., chapter 3, in Slaughterhouse-Five […] (A Seymour Lawrence Book), New York, N.Y.: Delacorte Press, →OCLC:

     During the night, some of the locomotives began to tootle to one another, and then to move.

2. (transitive) To play (a musical instrument) making such a sound.
   • 1917, Horace Annesley Vachell, chapter 11, in Fishpingle: A Romance of the Countryside‎^[3], New York: George H. Doran, page 204:

     A young, fresh-faced man, sitting by the driver, tootled a tandem horn.

   • 1933, Damon Runyon, “Broadway Complex”, in Runyon from First to Last‎^[4]:

     […] Cecil can tootle a pretty fair sax, at that, if the play happens to come up.

3. (intransitive, colloquial) To go (somewhere); to amble aimlessly.
   • 1933, Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Queen’s Square”, in A Treasury of Sayers Stories‎^[5], London: Gollancz, published 1958, page 48:

     I suppose we’d better tootle back to the ballroom.

   • 1949, Elsie J. Oxenham, chapter 8, in The Abbey Girls Go Back to School‎^[6], London: Collins:

     ‘When my old bike comes I shall tootle up and down the drive! Some swank!’

   • 1988, Alan Hollinghurst, chapter 10, in The Swimming-Pool Library, paperback edition, London: Penguin Books, →ISBN, page 221:

     I was about to go, I thought I’d tootle down to the Coleherne perhaps, then I wouldn’t be too far away if the bleep went.

4. (transitive, colloquial) To transport (someone somewhere).
   • 1911, Agnes and Egerton Castle, chapter 1, in The Composer‎^[7], Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, page 4:

     […] he would just see if his shover had enough in the tank to tootle them down to Warborough […]

   • 1953, Angela Thirkell, chapter 3, in Jutland Cottage‎^[8]:

     Say I pick you up and tootle you over with your hens.

Noun

tootle (plural tootles)

1. A soft toot sound.
   • 1891, Thirteen Essays on Education, London: Percival & Co., E. W. Howson, “The Teaching of Music in Public Schools,” p. 37,^[9]

     No one, least of all those with a musical ear, can take a form or even read a book in close proximity to the ineffectual tootle of a flute, the maddening squeaks of a raw fiddler, or the spasmodic grunts of a euphonium.

   • 1958, Eleanor Reindollar Wilcox, chapter 7, in Mr. Sims’ Argosy‎^[10], New York: Dodd, Mead, page 121:

     The glamour of the sawdust world, the cheers of the crowd, the smell of hot dogs and cotton candy, the blare and tootle of the midway—he envied the gypsy family, here today and gone tomorrow.

   • 2009, Mark Helprin, chapter 5, in Digital Barbarism, HarperCollins, page 170:

     One blast [of the trumpet], and [the sheep] would go here, two and they would go there, some tootles and they would run up the hill, a high note and they would stop short […]

2. (colloquial) A trip or excursion.
   • 1979, Oliver Reed, chapter 4, in Reed All About Me‎^[11], London: Hodder & Stoughton, published 1981, page 62:

     In between, is Granny May’s only daughter Juliet. A wonderful character who still joins me on the odd tootle.

   • 2008, Adam Karlin, “Miami & The Keys”, in Publications‎^[12], Lonely Planet, page 63:

     On weekends you can take a short tootle over to itsy-bitsy Pelican Island on a free ferry […]