tootle

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, London: Taylor and Hessey, p. 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, The Grey Woman, Chapter 27,

     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 1049770437; republished New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, 1944, OCLC 20350211:

     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, Kurt Vonnegut, chapter 3, in Slaughterhouse-Five […] :

     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, Fishpingle: A Romance of the Countryside, New York: George H. Doran, Chapter 11, p. 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,

     […] 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, London: Gollancz, 1958, p. 48,

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

   • 1949, Elsie J. Oxenham, The Abbey Girls Go Back to School, London: Collins, Chapter  8,

     ‘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, OCLC 17841394, 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, The Composer, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, Chapter 1, p. 4,

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

   • 1953, Angela Thirkell, Jutland Cottage, Chapter 3,

     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,

     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, Mr. Sims’ Argosy, New York: Dodd, Mead, Chapter 7, p. 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, Digital Barbarism, HarperCollins, Chapter 5, p. 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, Reed All About Me, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1981, Chapter 4, p. 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, Lonely Planet Publications, p. 63,

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