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Dribble   Listen
verb
Dribble  v. i.  (past & past part. dribbled; pres. part. dribbing)  
1.
To fall in drops or small drops, or in a quick succession of drops; as, water dribbles from the eaves.
2.
To slaver, as a child or an idiot; to drivel.
3.
To fall weakly and slowly. Perhaps an error for dribbing. (Obs.) "The dribbling dart of love."
4.
In basketball, football and similar games, to dribble (2) the ball.
5.
To live or pass one's time in a trivial fashion.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Dribble" Quotes from Famous Books



... swabbing from my cot, and dressed sitting on my big box. However, I got the leak stopped and cabin dried, and no harm done, as I had put everything up off the floor the night before, suspicious of a dribble which came in. Then my cot frame was broken by my cuddy boy and I lurching over against S-'s bunk, in taking it down. The carpenter has given me his own, and takes my broken one for himself. Board ship is a famous place for tempers. Being easily satisfied, I get all I want, and ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon

... heap o'leaves and stibble Has cost thee mony a weary nibble! Now thou's turn'd out for a' thy trouble, But house or hauld, To thole the winter's sleety dribble And cranreuch cauld. ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus

... activity of the body, and spent our lives doing all kinds of things in which there was no sense. Think of reading one or two morning and evening papers every day. To be sure we said there was nothing in them, but we used up our eyesight over them, and let a stream of silliness and scandal dribble through our minds. As ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith

... head was a foraging cap, which, when he took it off, showed that he was quite bald. His age might be about fifty-five or sixty; his complexion florid, no whiskers and little beard, nose straight, lips thin, teeth black with chewing, and always a little brown dribble from the left corner of his mouth (there was a leak there, he said). Altogether his countenance was prepossessing, for it was honest and manly, but his waist ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat

... of having played together. There was, at this time, a good deal of bad blood between the House and Buller's, and the play was not always quite clean. There was a good deal of fisting in the scrum. Gordon was in great form; he scored the first try with a long dribble, and led the pack well. Lovelace dropped a goal from a mark nearly midway between the twenty-five and the half-way line. Collins scrambled over the corner from a line out. Buller's only scored once, when Aspinall, their ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh

... continued: Yes, count on that. But inwardly she relaxed. Such danger as there may have been had gone. Under the dribble of the mucilage the fire in his eyes had flickered and sunk. He was too glued now for revolt. So she thought, but she did ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus

... bit heap o' leaves an' stibble Has cost thee mony a weary nibble! Now thou's turned out, for a' thy trouble, But house or hald, To thole the winter's sleety dribble, An' cranreuch cauld! ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various

... them out of a dark closet, opened one—there were ten—and allowed the coins to dribble through his fingers. Finally he turned and stared at Miss Thorne, who, pallid and weary, ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle

... pass out of, pour out of, flow out of; pass out of, evacuate. exude, transude; leak, run through, out through; percolate, transcolate^; egurgitate^; strain, distill; perspire, sweat, drain, ooze; filter, filtrate; dribble, gush, spout, flow out; well, well out; pour, trickle, &c (water in motion) 348; effuse, extravasate [Med.], disembogue^, discharge itself, debouch; come forth, break forth; burst out, burst through; find vent; escape &c 671. Adj. effused &c ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... kettle was aggravating and obstinate. It wouldn't allow itself to be adjusted on the top bar; it wouldn't hear of accommodating itself kindly to the knobs of coal; it would lean forward with a drunken air, and dribble—a very idiot of a kettle —on the hearth. It was quarrelsome, and hissed and ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson

... mine own heart, so to my head, And thence into my fingers trickled; Then to my pen, from whence immediately On paper I did dribble it daintily." ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey

... sweat, his boots were cut with rock till the leather hung in shreds, and a bleeding arm showed through the rents in his sleeve. But he felt no physical discomfort, only the exhilaration of a rock climber with the summit in sight, or a polo player with a clear dribble before him to the goal. At last he was playing a true game of hazard, and the chance ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan

... Frank, as he picked up some of the substance on the kneading board and let it dribble through his fingers, "but as Tony says, ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall

... and evidently thrust out by Bert Rhine, was the first to appear. When it was observed that Mr. Pike did not fire, the rest began to dribble into view. This continued till all were there save the cook, the two sail-makers, and the second mate. The last to come out were Tom Spink, the boy Buckwheat, and Herman Lunkenheimer, the good-natured ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London

... of an ever-present hunger, that sapped both strength and spirits. They had started out with but three days' rations, and four days passed before a scanty supply of hard-tack, bacon, and coffee began to dribble into camp. The road to Siboney, flooded by constant rains, bowlder-strewn, and inches deep in mud, was for a long time impassable to wagons; and during those six days such supplies of food and ammunition as reached the idle army were brought ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe

... board ship, and in the morning very early found that the tide had gone down and that she lay on her side, high and dry. The tide went back so far that it was possible to walk from the island to the mainland. As for the frith, it had shrunk to a dribble of water. But all this made no matter, so eager were they to savour the country which was heralded by so fair an island. They jumped off the ship's side on to the sand, which was firm and white, and ran to shore, and up the frith, where ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett

... face. My hair had grown longish, and I ran my hands through it till it stood up like a cockatoo's crest. Then I cunningly disposed the methylated spirits in the places most likely to smell. I burned a little on the floor, I spilt some on the counter and on my hands, and I let it dribble over my coat. In five minutes I had made the room stink like a shebeen. I loosened the collar of my shirt, and when I looked at myself in the cover of my watch I saw a specimen of debauchery which would have done credit to a Saturday night's ...
— Prester John • John Buchan

... islands, sometimes; in a man, they show what stuff is in him. It would be better to commit a deadly crime than to dribble out a life ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne

... place in a million American homes. There was plenty of sale for it—indeed, that was just the trouble; for it was sold on payments—small monthly payments—while the cost of manufacture and the liberal agents' commissions were cash items, and it would require a considerable period before the dribble of collections would swell into a tide large enough to satisfy the steady outflow of expense. A sale of twenty-five sets a day meant prosperity on paper, but unless capital could be raised from some other source to make and market those books through a period of months, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... end of the week the trade went slack. There was only the slightest dribble of gold. An occasional penny was reluctantly disposed of for ten sticks, while several thousand ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London

... in this Farmstead of ours," says De Ligne, "had fallen to shooting pigeons." The night had been unusually dark; the Austrian Army had squatted into woods, into office-houses, farm-villages, over a wide space of country; and only as the day rose, began to dribble in. By count, they are still 50,000; but heart-broken, beaten as men seldom were. "What sound is that?" men asked yesterday at Brieg, forty miles off; and nobody could say, except that it was some huge ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle

... out of the pond,' whispers Buck. 'Aisy now,' says he, 'an' I'll dribble the water out gently,' says he, 'an' we'll catch her alive at the bottom of it like a trout.' So he drains the wather out gently of the bucket till it was near all gone, an' then he looks into the bucket expectin' to find the moon flounderin' in ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... pockets and commenced to dribble a stream of halves and quarters into Thomas's hat. The information was of the pile-driver system of news, and it telescoped my intellects for a while. While I was leaking small change and smiling foolish on the outside, and suffering ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry

... huddled uncomfortably on the back seat. Their robes of vivid colour, always harmoniously blent, leave bare the slender brown legs and often the breast and back. Children stark naked ride on their mothers' hips or their fathers' shoulder. Now and again the oxen are unyoked at a dribble of water, and a party rests and eats in the shade. Otherwise it is one long march with bare feet over ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... little house unharmed, the very centre of the cataract! For a few yards on the top of the rock, the torrent had a nearly horizontal channel, along which it rushed with unabated speed to the edge, and thence shot clean over the cottage, dropping only a dribble of rain on the roof from the underside of its half-arch. The garden ground was gone, swept clean from the bare rock, which made a fine smooth shoot for the water a long distance in front. He darted through the drizzle and spray, reached the door, and lifted the hatch. ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... the creature on the stage was little more than a limp and a dribble, but there was enough of him to sing a song telling us in the Neapolitan dialect that his notion of happiness was to stroll up and down the Toledo ogling the girls. When he had finished acknowledging ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones

... or child. The people who had gathered about him thinking to hear something definite looked resentfully at his back as he walked away, and Mrs. Crumpet openly expressed her opinion that he knew nothing more about it himself. "If he did, he couldn't help letting it dribble out by degrees, like a leaky kirn, being too stingy to tell it out free, like any ...
— The Scotch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins

... one has said, they do everything for the poor except get off their backs. The very money they dribble out in their child's schemes has been wrung from the poor. They come from a race of successful and predatory bipeds who stand between the worker and his wages, and they try to tell the worker what ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London

... me like turkey-cocks! By Jove, it was worth it! They would dribble out, looking half their proper size after I had done telling them what was the matter ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... useful. Nay, we will even, I think, have in front of each of them a real fountain; not like the drinking-fountains—though they are great and needful boons—which you see here and there about the streets, with a tiny dribble of water to a great deal of expensive stone: but real fountains, which shall leap, and sparkle, and plash, and gurgle; and fill the place with life, and light, and coolness; and sing in the people's ears the sweetest of all earthly songs—save the song of a mother ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... sun is coming—the sun is the fountain of life—ay, mon brave, there are some shakes in these stout legs yet!" He shook his head with a fine air of cunning and knowingness, grinning very oddly; and then, falling grave with a startling suddenness, he began to dribble out a piratical love-story he had once before favoured me with, describing the charms of the woman with a horrid leer, his head nodding with the nervous affection of age all the time, whilst he looked blindly in my direction—a hideous and yet ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell

... it, man. It's luxury not to know how much it is.' A dribble of coins tinkled from the blanket to the floor. 'Don't pick them up,' he cried, as Barend stooped. 'This is like water in a long trek to me.' He picked up a handful of money and strewed it abroad. 'I can die,' he said, 'now ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon

... the carriole at the river's edge to the door of the saw-miller's cabin, he drew the cork of the vial, and poured out the poison; it followed him a few steps, a black dribble of murder on the snow, that the miller's dog smelt at and turned from in offence. That night he could not sleep again; toward morning, when all the house was snoring, he gave way to the sobs that were bursting his heart. He heard the sleepers, men and dogs, start a little ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells

... well, Mandy; but when I dies I don't want no flowers on my grave. Jes' plant a good old watermelon-vine; an' when she gits ripe, you come dar, an' don't you eat it, but jes' bus' it on de grave, an' let de good old juice dribble down thro' de ground!" ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers

... for man or woman lies in separate and solitary paths through the wilderness of this world. To an intelligent angel, seated on the arch of the heavens, the spectacle of the latter-day pseudo-philosophic and economic dribble about the doubtful expediency of having a wife, and the failure of marriage, must seem as ludicrous as would a convention of birds or of flowers reasoning that the processes of nature had continued long enough. Edith was simply ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... heap o' leaves an' stibble [stubble] Has cost thee mony a weary nibble! Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble, But house or hald, [Without, holding] To thole the winter's sleety dribble, [endure] ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson

... cut to the quick. For twenty years and more she had attended this annual dinner; she had attached herself there to former friends and neighbors, who listened indulgently to her narrow little dribble of reminiscent gossip—the gossip and reminiscences of the smaller town and the earlier day. This dinner was her sole remaining connection (little as she had realized it) with the great and complex city of the present day, just as it was the sole reason ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller

... Darco at the moment of his entrance. 'Glear for Act dwo.' People began to dribble into the outlying darkness. 'Do you hear?' he stormed, clapping his hands together. 'Glear for Act dwo. Look here, ladies and chentlemen, I am Cheorge Dargo. I do not ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... war. I remember yet how on my last night there a gale made the lamps swing and flicker, and turned the grey-green canvas walls into a mass of mottled shadows. The floor canvas was muddy from the tramping of many feet bringing in the constant dribble of casualties from the line. In my tent there was no one very bad at the time, except a boy with his shoulder half-blown off by a whizz-bang, who lay in a drugged sleep at the far end. The majority were influenza, bronchitis, ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan

... makes her sue to recover the thousand dollars she paid the legal fees will eat up that sum—and he can afford to hire lawyers and dribble along through the courts ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long

... first time, stand up while holding the tube in the anus, refill the bag and then lie down again and continue filling. You might have an assistant do this for you. You might try hanging the bag from the shower head and direct a slow, continuous dribble of lukewarm water from the shower into the bag while you kneel or lie relaxed in the tub. This way the bag will never empty and you stop filling only when you feel fullness and pressure all the way back to the beginning of the ascending colon. Of course, hanging from a slowly running ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon

... o' leaves an' stibble, Has cost thee mony a weary nibble! Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble, But house or hald,[7-10] To thole[7-11] the winter's sleety dribble, An' cranreuch[7-12] cauld! ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester

... is right," replied the Castilian; "for to advise this good man is to kick against the pricks; still for all that it fills me with pity that the sound wit they say the blockhead has in everything should dribble away by the channel of his knight-errantry; but may the bad luck your worship talks of follow me and all my descendants, if, from this day forth, though I should live longer than Methuselah, I ever give advice to anybody even if he asks ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... world has yet to hear it. Now, we cannot easily conceive Isaiah or Jeremiah hawking round his prophecies at the houses of publishers, or permitting a smart Yankee to syndicate them through the world, or even allowing popular magazines to dribble them out by monthly instalments. But the modern prophet has no housetop, and it is as difficult to imagine him moving his nation by voice alone as arranging with a local brother-seer to trumpet forth the great tidings simultaneously at New York ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... spade, by an old maid, lemo, lemo. Here y' are now, gents, gitch nice cool drink, on'y five a glass. There is even the hook for the ice-cream candy man to throw the taffy over when he pulls it. I like to watch him. It makes me dribble at the mouth ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood

... we find that machines to perform the same service as torpedoes were thought of in those days. He tells "Dr Allen," with whom he had "some good discourse about physick and chymistry, what Dribble, the German Doctor, do offer of an instrument to sink ships he tells me that which is more strange, that something made of gold, which they call in chymistry aurum fulminans, a grain, I think he said, of it, put ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston

... came a break. But this could not be called Jack's fault. The first Longley player up, a chap named Mason, managed to dribble the ball toward third, and before either the baseman or the shortstop could send it over he had reached first. Then, on a wild throw to second, the runner not only covered that bag, but went on and slid in ...
— The Rover Boys in the Land of Luck - Stirring Adventures in the Oil Fields • Edward Stratemeyer

... to my knees, scooped up a handful of sand, and let it dribble slowly through my fingers. Harry looked straight at me and his eyes widened in alarm. It must have been the look on my face. He arose and crossed to where I was sitting, his mouth twitching slightly. There was nothing very reassuring about Harry. Life had not been kind to him ...
— The Man the Martians Made • Frank Belknap Long

... to refuse to talk of our own feelings or desires or affections, unless for some end which we know may help us to more light and better strength. Talking, however, is mild in its weakening effect compared with thinking. It is better to dribble sham sentiment in words over and over than to think it, and repress the desire to talk. The only clear way is to drop it from our minds the moment it appears; to let go of it as we would loosen our fingers and drop something ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call

... it were pleasant with you To fly from this tussle of foes, The shambles, the charnel, the wrinkle! To dwell in yon dribble of dew On the cheek of your sovereign rose, And live the young life ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... lake, bedded in hard gravel and maintained by a dribble of water from a brook on the north shore. Alcatraz snorted in disgust at his folly. What had disturbed them was exactly what had disturbed him—thirst. He controlled his own desire for water, however, and followed an instinct that made ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand

... anybody went out they'd let somebody else in. Along about eleven o'clock a lot of the people began to go home. Then a new crowd come in. People who had taken their childern home and put them to bed would come back for more fun. Others, who had spent the evening dining, began to dribble in. ...
— Colonel Crockett's Co-operative Christmas • Rupert Hughes

... Sometimes at the same period, but more frequently some months later, four more double teeth slowly make their appearance, one on each side of each jaw, completing the entire series of the child's first set of twenty teeth. It is asserted that a child, while cutting its teeth, should either dribble excessively, vomit after every meal, or be greatly relaxed. Though one or other, or all of these at once, may attend a case of teething, it by no means follows that any one of them should accompany this process of nature, though there can be no ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... pay a handful of men salaries at which the cook of any large London hotel would turn up his nose, you cannot expect to have the master minds of the world at your service; and save for a few independent or devoted men, therefore, it is not reasonable to suppose that such a poor little dribble of medical research as is now going on is in the hands of persons of much more than average mental equipment. How ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... to descend upon the room like a monstrous pall may be estimated at two minutes, though for a short period after that the phonograph gags and the notes of the Japanese train song dribble from the end of TANA'S flute. Of the nine people only BARNES, PARAMORE, and TANA are unaware of the late-comer's identity. Of the nine not one is aware that ADAM PATCH has that morning made a contribution of fifty thousand dollars to ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... nostrils spread, trying to catch any taint in the air which might warn him of danger. But in the dead calm the heavy evergreens stirred not; no whiff reached him. The second call upset his prudence. Then he heard that splash and dribble in the water, and imagined that his impatient mate was dipping her nose into the lake for ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook

... nothing mean or insignificant. An uprooted daisy becomes in his pages an enduring emblem of the fate of artless maid and simple bard. He disturbs a mouse's nest and finds in the "tim'rous beastie" a fellow-mortal doomed like himself to "thole the winter's sleety dribble," and draws his oft-repeated moral. He walks abroad and, in a verse that glints with the light of its own rising sun before the fierce sarcasm of "The Holy Fair," describes the melodies of a "simmer Sunday morn." He loiters by Afton Water and "murmurs by the running brook a music ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... ..." Braun let the sentence dribble away as he stuffed the paper into a coat pocket, which had obviously been used as a waste receptacle for many a year, and led the way up the cement walk, his younger ...
— The Common Man • Guy McCord (AKA Dallas McCord Reynolds)

... wrenched of JONES and BROWN, Those ornaments of London Town; Their listless fingers dribble down: ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 28, 1891 • Various

... engineer who conquered the jungle and the gorges, ran the ditch and made the horse-trail. He built enduringly, in concrete and masonry, and made one of the most remarkable water-farms in the world. Every little runlet and dribble is harvested and conveyed by subterranean channels to the main ditch. But so heavily does it rain at times that countless spillways let the surplus escape to ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London

... goodness, to make search in the beds, in case there might be any weans there, human life being still more precious than human means; but not a living soul was seen but a cat, which, being raised and wild with the din, would on no consideration allow itself to be catched. Jacob Dribble found that to his cost; for, right or wrong, having a drappie in his head, he swore like a trooper that he would catch her, and carry her down beneath his oxter; so forward he weired her into a corner, crouching on his hunkers. He had much better have let it alone; for it fuffed ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir

... I've done it," said Mrs. Poyser; "but I've had my say out, and I shall be th' easier for't all my life. There's no pleasure i' living if you're to be corked up for ever, and only dribble your mind out by the sly, like a leaky barrel. I shan't repent saying what I think, if I live to be as old as th' old squire; and there's little likelihood—for it seems as if them as aren't wanted here are th' only folks as aren't wanted ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot

... a certain following of thirsty herbs and shrubs. The willows go as far as the stream goes, and a bit farther on the slightest provocation. They will strike root in the leak of a flume, or the dribble of an overfull bank, coaxing the water beyond its appointed bounds. Given a new waterway in a barren land, and in three years the willows have fringed all its miles of banks; three years more and they will touch tops across it. It is perhaps due to the ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin

... a passenger left by the last boat or "too previous" for the next. Well for you if you are sufficiently respectable to pass muster with the official whose duty it is to see that no one secures a day's lodging for two cents. There is a slow dribble of wayfarers, who seldom spend their time in the dismal and dingy waiting-room unless in very cold weather or to stand guard over their parcels which they have piled upon the seats. But all at once (especially if the next boat is to connect with some train ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various

... like pistol-shots. The whole thing suggests more a national migration than the march of an army. And ever on the horizon hang new clouds of dust, and on distant slopes the scattered advance guards of new columns dribble into view. I fancy the Huns or the Goths, in one of their vast tribal invasions, may have moved like this. Or you might liken us to the dusty pilgrims on some great caravan route ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps

... national domain to be bought for nothing at the next Revolution? Wait till then, and you'll get your land without paying for it, as Rigou got his; whereas if you go and thrust this estate into the jaws of the rich folk of the valley, the rich folk will dribble it back to you impoverished and at twice the price they paid for it. You are working for their interests, I tell you; so does everybody who ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac

... close, the audience began to dribble out before the last half of the act began, and the curtain went down on the final scene while scores of women were putting on their wraps. A loyal few called Helen before the curtain, and her brave attempt to smile made ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland



Words linked to "Dribble" :   leach, flowing, dribbler, association football, drip, filter, drool, athletics, double dribble, run, basketball, pour, sport, drop, slobber, dribbling, soccer, flow, course, salivate, drivel, intravenous drip, trickle, propulsion



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