(v. i.) To make a hollow or humming noise, like that of a bumblebee; to cry as a bittern.
Example Sentences:
(1) Eye-to-eye, the bumbling bonhomie appeared to be a lacquer of likability over a living obelisk of corporate power.
(2) Just a stepover here, a Cruyff turn there, and his opponent would be destroyed ... Only in real life, Boruc stumbled and bumbled and Olivier Giroud pounced to score.
(3) The Palestinian comedy team Watan a Watar have enjoyed huge success with their take on an Isis propaganda video featuring a roadblock and a quiz: incorrect answers mean instant execution but these jolly, bumbling jihadis win points to get them to Paradise.
(4) Wallace is a hopeless deadpan dropout, a loser in love and a bumbling muddle.
(5) Accompanied by prolonged silences, it makes the recipients go weak at the knees and blurt out bumbling apologies, as we saw with Nixon's cathartic admission – and then, of course, forgiveness.
(6) Even the suggestion that Christie might enter the race will serve to upend it, with current front-runner Rick Perry causing dismay among some Republicans after a catalogue of bumbling debate performances.
(7) The kidnapping of more than 300 schoolgirls by Boko Haram threw the international spotlight on the rebels, but also highlighted a bumbling government approach to the public.
(8) And then they find a further delay, some kind of situation in the outfield with Eranga, who's had some kind of affair thrown at him from the stand; Bumble thinks it's a piece of cheese, Wensleydale, no doubt.
(9) Deep down, I believe the character really has bumbled her way through a mafia career, using her naivety as protection.
(10) Better, in fact, than Romney's bumbling foreign adventures , which rather than providing voters with a storyline on which they could take a practiced ideological stand, was likely to be seen as a mostly embarrassing, ultimately unrelatable foreign policy glad-hand tour, set to Yackety Sax .
(11) 3.50pm BST Michael Parkinson is in with Gower and Bumble.
(12) Allozyme variation at an average of 37.3 loci was assessed in queens of 16 Bombus and 2 Psithyrus bumble bee species from North America.
(13) The film shuffles interconnecting storylines concerning three Manhattan sisters: the warm, well-meaning Hannah (Mia Farrow) is married to the bumbling Elliot (Michael Caine), who is in turn attracted to her sister, Lee (Barbara Hershey).
(14) More people who voted Labour in 2015 would choose Theresa May as prime minister than Jeremy Corbyn Having endlessly bumbled around the central questions of Brexit, Labour has now come up with six “tests” for the government’s eventual agreement.
(15) As I keep saying, the IMF, ECB and Eurogroup aren’t supervillains and they aren’t bumbling incompetents.
(16) Click here for the Paddington trailer There was a swift online reaction to the still image from the film pictured above, in which Paddington looks less like the harmlessly bumbling bear of Michael Bond's books and more a malevolent creature, disturbingly sentient enough to dress itself in a duffel coat.
(17) Bumbling out of the shop with far too many sausage rolls?
(18) Jonathan was in constant demand whenever a comic toff or a bumbling cleric was called for on TV.
(19) He will be the man who wrecked his premiership by bumbling into a referendum commitment that he didn’t originally want to pledge and then bungling his country out of the EU.
(20) Clinal variation in colour morph frequency in the bumble bee Bombus melanopygusis analysed.
Stumble
Definition:
(v. i.) To trip in walking or in moving in any way with the legs; to strike the foot so as to fall, or to endanger a fall; to stagger because of a false step.
(v. i.) To walk in an unsteady or clumsy manner.
(v. i.) To fall into a crime or an error; to err.
(v. i.) To strike or happen (upon a person or thing) without design; to fall or light by chance; -- with on, upon, or against.
(v. t.) To cause to stumble or trip.
(v. t.) Fig.: To mislead; to confound; to perplex; to cause to err or to fall.
(n.) A trip in walking or running.
(n.) A blunder; a failure; a fall from rectitude.
Example Sentences:
(1) Former acting director of the CIA, Michael Morell, also weighed in for Clinton in a New York Times opinion piece on Friday, declaring: “Donald J Trump is not only unqualified for the job, but he may well pose a threat to our national security.” Republicans stumbling from the wreckage of a terrible week are worrying about how to contain the damage further down the ballot paper in November as people running for seats in Congress and at state level risk being swept away.
(2) On Saturday I made my second trip to the campsite in Lower Stumble – my first journey was on 28 July.
(3) 11.10pm BST Apart from the stumbles in the sales pitch, it's still not clear how the Abbott government will secure most of its budget.
(4) CBS, which says it stumbled across its advance copy in a bookstore, happens to own the book's publisher, Simon & Schuster.
(5) However, the main stumbling block is the increasingly chronic shortage of many different types of medical staff – nurses, GPs, paramedics, radiologists, A&E doctors and many others – that the NHS is facing.
(6) The surprise move came after Tuesday's much-noticed stumble, when the US supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, jumbled the words, prompting Obama to follow suit.
(7) Myners – a non-executive director of Co-op group – was also scathing in his assessment of the board members after asking them a simple retail question and likening their inability to answer to that of Paul Flowers, former chairman of the Co-op bank, who had stumbled over basic questions posed by the Treasury select committee last year.
(8) Unfortunately, a lack of knowledge regarding the field among the general public and within the medical community as well functions as a major stumbling block to the growth of our profession.
(9) He may not be the greatest orator, sometimes stressing the wrong word in a sentence or stumbling over his Autocue, and he may not deliver media-managed soundbites with the ease that the PM does, but he is good with the public.
(10) Polls opened at 4am across the country, which suffered decades of army-led dictatorship followed by a stumbling reform process.
(11) Just a stepover here, a Cruyff turn there, and his opponent would be destroyed ... Only in real life, Boruc stumbled and bumbled and Olivier Giroud pounced to score.
(12) In the most uncomfortable and revelatory moments, Cameron stumbled as he was asked whether he saw Brooks every weekend in 2008 and 2009, before his wife Samantha told him in the lunchtime break that they had met every six weeks, or a bit more.
(13) He was like the man with staring eyes who stumbled up and down Oxford Street with a placard declaring the end of the world to be nigh.
(14) So intense was the pre‑match excitement in Dortmund over the return of the prodigal Jürg – much of it media-led – that walking around this flat, functional city on the afternoon of the game you half expected to stumble across Klopp shrines, New Orleans-style Klopp jazz funerals, to look up and find his great beaming visage looming over the city like some vast alien saucer.
(15) It is essential, therefore, that a legal agreement is agreed at the COP21 talks in order to create a process after Paris through which countries will review their efforts and find ways to ramp up their actions on reducing emissions.” A major stumbling block facing negotiators at Paris will be finance.
(16) Poyet will feel infinitely worse should Sunderland stumble once again at Spurs.
(17) There are pages where, unexpectedly, amid the horror, a reader feels he has stumbled on a near-inconsequential diary entry.
(18) She stumbled to her door, but found she could not walk out; she had to crawl as the ground swayed beneath her.
(19) Diane Abbott will continue to be a key figurehead in Labour’s general election campaign, the party has indicated, despite a stumbling radio performance in which she struggled to explain how a pledge to hire 10,000 extra police officers would be funded.
(20) But in that case, it will inevitably be harder to re-establish confidence in the intelligence on which the White House is basing its decisions, and the world's sole superpower risks stumbling onwards half-blind, unable to distinguish real threats from phantoms.