"He's dabbling in Italian." "She's dabbling in trim carpentry." "Thanks to YouTube, we can all be dabblers in makeup artistry." examples:įeeling ogled, and not wanting to talk to any of the other attendees, I arranged myself into a posture I hoped would look aloof and mysterious, one that would say, "I might dabble in Muay Thai or Krav Maga. "Don't mention how horrible her sewing is she'll be dabbling in something else soon anyway."īut you might simply be describing someone graced with the time, the curiosity, and the confidence to follow her whims. When you say that someone dabbles in something, there might be a judgmental edge to your comment, as if you're calling that person a dilettante: someone involved in some sphere or activity in a manner that's unskilled, unprofessional, and perhaps baselessly arrogant. It can be the transitive kind: you dabble your finger in the paint, or you dabble a scratch with medicine.īut when we use it figuratively, it's the intransitive kind: you dabble in a sport, you dabble in poetry, you dabble in the world of drawing manga. Dabbling is usually done for fun rather than for a serious, professional purpose. More generally speaking, if you dabble, or if you dabble in an activity or interest, you get involved in it just a little bit, as if you're dipping just your fingers or toes into it rather than jumping all the way in. ![]() To dabble is to get just a little wet by splashing a bit. (To reveal any word with blanks, give it a click.) make your point with. You can think of the frequentative forms ( dabble, crumble, sparkle, etc.) as the children to the parent forms ( dab, crumb, spark, etc.), which is how I love to think of them, because the kid forms are so cute: glimmer, snuggle, speckle, tickle, twinkle. ![]() The same goes for blab and blabber, crumb and crumble, spark and sparkle, stride and straddle, f_t and flutter, scud and s_e, and so on. ![]() And dabble is the frequentative form of dab. Do you dab? Do you a dab a lot? Then you dabble. The word dabble is an example of a frequentative, which, like it sounds, is a form of a word that expresses frequent, or repeated, action.
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