(v. t.) To wet by little dips or strokes; to spatter; to sprinkle; to moisten; to wet.
(v. i.) To play in water, as with the hands; to paddle or splash in mud or water.
(v. i.) To work in slight or superficial manner; to do in a small way; to tamper; to meddle.
Example Sentences:
(1) Now she also dabbles in playwriting and rap, and is in the band Sound of Rum .
(2) Rebelling by dabbling in drink, fags, sex – the list goes on – is part of growing up.
(3) Asked by a troll how long he planned to “live off” his Olympic success, and if he would ever do anything of consequence again, Rutherford suggested he might become a porn star or dabble in pottery instead.
(4) With Jackie Collins announcing plans to self-publish a revised version of her novel The Bitch, even traditionally published authors are now dabbling in self-publishing, and the survey found this was to good effect: they earned 2.5 times more when self-publishing than did rejected authors or authors who went straight to self-publishing.
(5) Mean arterial blood pressure in dives was unchanged from pre-dive levels in both naive and trained dabbling ducks.
(6) The US dabbled ineffectually in helping the rebel cause, hobbled by uncertainty over the groups it was dealing with.
(7) His father was a doctor who dabbled in property and ran for local election on a far-right ticket in 1959.
(8) He seems to hanker after footholds – a dabble with Scientology has come to an end, and it seems fair to say that the experience has contributed to what he calls his "wounded position".
(9) He is a maverick, a teenager – and dabbles in enough off-beat skits to fill that token jazz category.
(10) Absolute Radio has already launched the digital services Absolute Radio Classic Rock, Absolute 80s, Absolute 90s and its user-controlled station, dabbl .
(11) That may be so - and both the Times and Telegraph dabble in the Mail market.
(12) He also dabbled in cleaning and fabric-dying businesses, thought of becoming a professional cameraman and was eager to market self-designed chess sets, optical machines and scientific toys.
(13) The cause of the yearly death of an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 migrating dabbling ducks (Anas spp.)
(14) Dickens said dabbl would initially be a London-based service on DAB but would soon expand its reach to parts of the south of England including Essex, Berkshire, Wiltshire and Bristol.
(15) Blessed – or cursed – with Africa's most famous name, many of the Mandelas have gone into business; a few have dabbled in politics and two are starring in a much-derided reality TV show, Being Mandela .
(16) It wasn't until 2005, in Untold Stories, that he discussed his sexuality and said he considered himself gay, despite his long-term dabbling with the other side.
(17) The Nevada state assemblywoman was – before her dabble as negotiator-in-chief – best known for the striking images she distributes of herself and her family armed with guns.
(18) Yet one of the rationales for QE is that it discourages investors from holding government bonds and encourages them to dabble in riskier assets.
(19) Donald Trump may have insulted Mexicans, Muslims and women but to woo Indian American voters he’s even dabbling in Hindi for Diwali.
(20) They charge visitors $20 for a tour, carry out routine maintenance to prevent it turning to dust, and hope that one day the old autocrat’s children, who continue to dabble in politics, will restore it for the nation.
Drabble
Definition:
(v. t.) To draggle; to wet and befoul by draggling; as, to drabble a gown or cloak.
(v. i.) To fish with a long line and rod; as, to drabble for barbels.
Example Sentences:
(1) She also spoke of her "suspicion" of memoir as a form: a form that her younger sister the novelist Margaret Drabble – who spoke at the festival on Thursday but was notably absent from Byatt's event – undertook in her 2009 book The Pattern in the Carpet, about the writers' aunt Phyllis.
(2) With more than 900 participants from 47 different countries, the festival will showcase new poetry from Simon Armitage and former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, talks from the UK's poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy and the former US poet laureate Billy Collins, and events from a wide-ranging list of major names including Jung Chang, Margaret Drabble and Richard Dawkins – fresh from inciting controversy for apparently questioning the merits of fairy tales .
(3) When Simpson suggested there are few sympathetic men in Drabble's stories, Drabble retorted that it was surely true of them both.
(4) It's only slowly, and in recent years, that the voice of the mother has come out – the odd middlebrow novel of the kind Virago and Persephone rescue ( EM Delafield or Dorothy Whipple ) and more recently Margaret Drabble , Julie Myerson , Rachel Cusk .
(5) In her 1963 novel A Summer Birdcage , Margaret Drabble’s narrator Sarah describes a “loathsome flat” in the King’s Road, Chelsea, and an “unspeakably sordid” place in Highgate.
(6) Lionel Shriver is the author of We Need to Talk about Kevin (Serpent's Tail) Margaret Drabble Photograph: Murdo Macleod The Bell Jar is a novel of reckless vitality, and although it's about death, trauma, suicide and madness, it's as exhilarating as its narrator's first mad dash down the ski slope when she manages triumphantly to break her leg in two places.
(7) She herself described her readers as "women and educated men", and expressed "puzzlement" when Margaret Drabble left her out of her 1985 edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature.
(8) Simpson reflected on the predictability of the "F question" in interviews, and it is one that Drabble will have heard often.
(9) Drabble has touched on her troubled relationship with her mother in various novels, such as Jerusalem the Golden (1967), about a girl who escapes an unhappy home in Northam (a fictional town Drabble has used more than once) to go to university, and most directly in her quasi-autobiographical novel The Peppered Moth (2001), in which she "wrote brutally" about her mother's depression.
(10) (Wesker's friend, Margaret Drabble, once told him that there is never any sex or violence in his plays – and reading this one, you do see what she means.)
(11) Drabble's work has always been characterised by astute social observation, a realism borne out of her admiration for Victorian fiction.
(12) Drabble is now a very youthful 72 (it was her birthday last week).
(13) Drabble held a big party for her 70th birthday a couple of years ago.
(14) Margaret Drabble The most erotic book I ever read was an anonymous novel called L'Histoire d'O , which I think was by a woman called Pauline Réage.
(15) As very young novelists, both wrote books – Drabble's first, A Summer Bird-Cage (1965) , and Byatt's second, The Game (1967) – about rivalrous sisters, which, more than 40 years on, still rankles, at least for Drabble (Byatt apologised for The Game , she says now).
(16) Drabble read Possession because she knew "that would be nothing to do with our family life.
(17) Bernardine's friend Margaret Drabble found the whole to be "frank, courageous and entertaining".
(18) His popularity is reflected in a rash of new books: the lavish RA exhibition catalogue, A Bigger Picture , comes with contributions from Margaret Drabble and Hockney himself, there is a book of conversations with the art critic Martin Gayford, A Bigger Message (both Thames & Hudson) as well as Hockney , a semi-authorised biography of the first half of his life by Christopher Simon Sykes (Century).
(19) Without referring specifically to Drabble's book, she said: "However well you write about your friends or family you diminish them," she said, "and it haunts me."
(20) Margaret Drabble's most recent book is A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman (Penguin Modern Classics) Sarah Churchwell Photograph: PR In 1957, six years before The Bell Jar would be published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, Sylvia Plath mused in her journals: "I could write a terrific novel.