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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



... said Emmanuel. 'Leave 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 I've money ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon

... 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

... 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 ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... 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 in order to obtain the American ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... joke about the Tappit-hen, as it was to him. Widow Fenton, as I have soberly hinted; for it is not a subject to be openly spoken of, had many ill-assorted and irregular characters among her customers; and a gang of play-actors coming to the town, and getting leave to perform in Mr Dribble's barn, batches of the young lads, both gentle and semple, when the play was over, used to adjourn to her house for pies and porter, the commodities in which she chiefly dealt. One night, when the deep tragedy of Mary Queen of Scots was the play, there was a great concourse ...
— The Provost • John Galt

... than to our friends. A watch is come for you. Do you want it soon, or shall I wait till some one travels your way? You, like me, I suppose, reckon the lapse of time from the waste thereof, as boys let a cock run to waste: too idle to stop it, and rather amused with seeing it dribble. Your poems have begun printing; Longman sent to me to arrange them, the old and the new together. It seems you have left it to him. So I classed them, as nearly as I could, according to dates. First, after the Dedication, (which must march first) and which ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas

... the assumption that the higher life 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 a natural woman, who felt rather than reasoned that ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... lemonade, lemo, lemo, lemo, made in the shade, with a 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 to ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood

... you keep but base quills, They're fit for nothing else but pasquils. I've often heard it from the wise, That inflammations in the eyes Will quickly fall upon the tongue, And thence, as famed John Bunyan sung, From out the pen will presently On paper dribble daintily. Suppose I call'd you goose, it is hard One word should stick thus in your gizzard. You're my goose, and no other man's; And you know, all my geese are swans: Only one scurvy thing I find, Swans sing when dying, geese when blind. But ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... heap o' leaves and 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, ...
— Heads and Tales • Various

... 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, ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat

... 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 bottom of it like ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... clumsy white Sahibs 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

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

... the bag and after the bag has emptied the 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 ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon

... 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 ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London

... something of the mule, and something of a soul trying to wander out of the forest of misfortune; his little, tip-tilted nose that never grew on pure-blooded Frenchman; under a scant moustache his thick lips, disfigured by infirmity of speech, whence passed so continually a dribble of saliva—sick British workman was stamped on him. Yet he was passionately fond of washing himself; his teeth, his head, his clothes. Into the frigid winter he would go, and stand at the 'Source' half an hour at a time, washing and washing. It was a cause of constant irritation ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy

... the 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

... pass out of, pour out of, flow out of; pass out of, evacuate. exude, transude; leak, run through, out through; percolate, transcolate|; egurgitate[obs3]; 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[obs3], discharge itself, debouch; come forth, break forth; burst out, burst through; find vent; escape &c. 671. Adj. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... ate every atom of his rarebit, he absorbed every drop of the moisture in the teapot, so that when she shook it and shook it, and then tried to pour something from it, there was no slightest dribble at the spout. But they lingered, talking and laughing, and perhaps they might never have left the place if the hard handmaiden who had brought the tea-tray had not first tried putting her head in at the swing-door from the kitchen, ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells

... carpenter. My cabin was flooded by a leak, and I superintended the baling and 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 ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon

... in a few hours, have made an impromptu concerning that Lafayette-crowned pump, and compared its lot now to the fortune of its patron some fifty years back. From him then issued, as from his fountain now, a feeble dribble of pure words; then, as now, some faint circles of disciples were willing to admire him. Certainly in the midst of the war and storm without, this pure fount of eloquence went dribbling, dribbling on, till of a sudden the revolutionary workmen knocked down statue and fountain, and ...
— The Second Funeral of Napoleon • William Makepeace Thackeray (AKA "Michael Angelo Titmarch")

... 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 wing three, who had his Seconds, got a decent pass, ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh

... 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 ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller

... of their aggregate labour in foul-aired stopes and roaring mill they could see in one massive lump. They could not see the aggregate of little bites that reduced the imposing mass to a tiny dribble which sometimes, but not always, fell into the treasury of the company. They would not believe, even ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason

... had the ring of a great importance in them. The men were going forward to the heart of the din. They were to confront the eager rush of the enemy. They felt the pride of their onward movement when the remainder of the army seemed trying to dribble down this road. They tumbled teams about with a fine feeling that it was no matter so long as their column got to the front in time. This importance made their faces grave and stern. And the backs of the ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane

... full force again, as the vast mass of snow, dammed up by the edge of the rock wall, would from time to time assume such proportions that the snow behind it finally drove it forward over the brink. Thus in successive cascades it ran on, until at last it died away in a faint dribble of thin white. Silence once more reigned in the valley. With their glasses they could now plainly see a vast mass of white choking the ...
— The Young Alaskans in the Rockies • Emerson Hough

... August news of the heavy fighting, which had been going on at the Dardanelles, began to dribble through. It was gathered that the results had not been entirely such as could have been hoped for, and that the casualties—particularly of the 10th Light Horse, the 11th and 16th Battalions—had been heavy. Information was also received of a disaster ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett

... right. But you've reached the age when you let your cigar ash dribble down onto your vest. Now me, I've got a kimono nature but a straight-front job, and it's kept me young. Young! I've got to be. That's my stock in trade. You see, Gabie, we're just twenty years late, both of ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber

... walked up from 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 ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells

... 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 sputtered morosely ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson

... whole 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 ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne

... in McLean. "I see it is evident you can tell me how Tommy Sandys will do," but at that Cathro's rush of words again subsided into a dribble. ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie

... 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

... 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 into ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston

... the others smoked rank and often damp "woodbines." The language was thick with grumbling and much swearing. At first it was not so bad. But some one touched the side of the tent and the rain began to dribble through. Then we found a tiny stream of wet slowly trickling along underneath the tent-walls towards the tent-pole, and by night time we were lying and sitting in ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave

... remarked with scornful emphasis ... "I shall harness myself once more to the car of triumphant prosperity, and stretch forth my hungry hands to catch the grains that dribble in the rear. Compromise! ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... gave him hand-hold. The chalk was rough and shale-like. He dug knees and toes into it. There was a constant dribble of stuff away from beneath his feet, and once a little ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant

... 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 he shall do with the pitiful ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London

... quiet 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 ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... 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 Battle, fateful of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle

... fools, strutting into 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 ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... only didn't dribble away in such cursed little drops!" growled the prince, raising his blunt nose and beckoning to ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... make it kitch? "Bo" I believe in a mystic way Frightens or soothes, but which? Didn't I see one once reversed, Patted about the spine? Is it the way they should all be nursed? Will it agree with mine? Surely its gums are strangely bare? Why does it dribble so? Will reason dawn in that glassy stare If I dandle it briskly? OH!!! Grandmothers! Mothers! or Instinct, you! Haste with your secret lore! What, oh what shall I, what shall I do? Baby has crashed ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 14, 1914 • Various

... a broken fountain in the middle of the square, overgrown with sickly lichen, and round it ran a stone bench. The acacias sheltered it, and a dribble of water from the conduit sounded always, fitting itself to one's thoughts in a murmuring cadence. Here Miss Gregory disposed herself, and here the dawn found her, a little disheveled, and looking rather old with the chill of that bleak ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon

... handful of little pebbles, and let them dribble down slowly between her outspread fingers while, turning her head, she gazed away ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... as easy to write a letter as when you've nothing at all to say, and must make up for lack of matter by weaving phrases? Now, when I'm suffering from a determination of too many words to my pen, they all run together in a torrent, and I don't know how to make them dribble singly to a beginning. ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... in the tree is betrayed by a dribble of scales, shells, and seed-wings, and, every few minutes, by the fall of the stripped axis of the cone. Then of course he is ready for another, and if you are watching you may catch a glimpse of him as he glides silently out to the end of a branch and see him examining the cone-clusters until ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir

... expected of me (his hands are white, and not much bigger than Tirzah Ann's). And then I removed the boy by voyalence, for he was a askin' questions agin, faster than ever; and he poured out over his shoulder a partin' dribble of questions, that lasted till we got outside. And then he tackled me, and he asked me somewhere in the neighborhood of a 1,000 questions on the way back to ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)

... were growing long when Piers Minor pointed out a cloud of dust far up the Palace Road. Later on they could distinguish the figures of men and horses. Stragglers and wounded began to dribble away from the fighting-line; they came running down the Palace Road, one by one, then in bunches of two and three and four. Piers Major, with his greatly superior force, was evidently ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen

... a bundle lying by his side, a red handkerchief that seemed to be holding food ... and flowing towards it, trickling, so slowly did it move, from his body was a little red dribble.... ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine

... well be as comfortable as we can." She reached for the canteen lying in a fast dwindling strip of rock shade. We drank sparingly. She let me dribble a few drops upon her shoulder. Thenceforth by silent agreement we moistened our tongues, scrupulously turn about, wringing the most from each brief sip as if testing the bouquet of exquisite wine. Came a time when we regretted this frugalness; but just now there persisted ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin

... madness of the Dyea beach, congested with thousand-pound outfits of thousands of men. This immense mass of luggage and food, flung ashore in mountains by the steamers, was beginning slowly to dribble up the Dyea Valley and across Chilkoot. It was a portage of twenty-eight miles, and could be accomplished only on the backs of men. Despite the fact that the Indian packers had jumped the freight from eight cents a pound to forty, ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London



Words linked to "Dribble" :   spit, association football, saliva, slabber, drivel, hoops, basketball game, athletics, actuation, soccer, run, salivate, leach, course, flow, dribbler, drip, pour, spittle, flowing, filter, intravenous drip, hit, slobber



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