(v. i.) To waste time in effeminate or voluptuous pleasures, or in idleness; to fool away time; to delay unnecessarily; to tarry; to trifle.
(v. i.) To interchange caresses, especially with one of the opposite sex; to use fondling; to wanton; to sport.
(v. t.) To delay unnecessarily; to while away.
Example Sentences:
(1) Residents of Cardiff , Cumbria and Plymouth are either dallying with the idea or actively pursuing it.
(2) Of 257 named characters, only a handful dare shoot up an ironic eyebrow, fewer dally in high camp.
(3) Indirect hemagglutination tests on sera from 251 Dall sheep (Ovis dalli) from interior Alaska collected during the period 1979 to 1987 revealed no evidence of exposure to Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae.
(4) Yes, she dallied with cocaine but she wouldn’t again.
(5) Now, however, all four Burgess boys are big news Down Under, where they have teamed up at the South Sydney Rabbitohs, and George became the first Briton ever to be named Rookie of the Year at the National Rugby League's Dally M awards night, only a few hours after McNamara had confirmed that he, Sam and Tom will be flying to South Africa this week to join England's high-altitude World Cup training camp in Potchefstroom.
(6) Only once did this concern the visiting defence – when Zabaleta dallied in the area but a cool touch allowed him and Kompany to clear the danger.
(7) Inevitably, it has provoked distrust in the rest of the continent: in which the chancellor's costly dilly-dallying during the debt crisis, led to remarks about a third world war in the British press.
(8) Both sides were exhibiting a wastefulness in the final third as Mark Davies dragged wide after a promising foray and Roger Espinoza dallied when bearing down on goal.
(9) In a typically water animal (Phocaenoides dalli) the cervical thickening is expressed feebly, the lumbar one is absent, the epidural space is developed better than in terrestrial and semiwater animals.
(10) Rats were given dally injections of nicotine in the same environment.
(11) Dalli, in a videoed interview with a Brussels political paper, said the investigators' report "stated there was no proof at all that I was involved in any misdeed" and that no decision of the commission had been jeopardised.
(12) Dodd toyed and dallied in the telling, knowing his audience couldn't know where the joke was going and then warning them, just before the punchline: "You don't deserve this."
(13) He picks out Liam Lawrence, who dilly-dallies then passes when he probably should have had a shot from distance.
(14) The commissioner John Dalli has revealed that he was forced to resign by the European commission president, José Manuel Barroso, following an investigation by the EU anti-fraud office Olaf into a complaint by a Swedish tobacco company.
(15) He wouldn't necessarily have chosen that path, but Glamorgan have dilly-dallied over the negotiations.
(16) I became negative and didn’t feel like myself.” It is no secret that the Dutchman, like Congerton, had become dismayed by Short’s reluctance to follow his advice and invest significant sums in root and branch reform of a squad which has spent the past few seasons dallying with relegation.
(17) For weeks now, Hollande has led the European response to the Syrian crisis, pursuing a hawkish approach to Damascus in stark contrast to the dilly-dallying of France's continental allies and neighbours.
(18) We noted frequency of body-image disturbance (BID) and dismorphophobias (DPP) in 97 girls and 8 boys among 107 girls and 8 boys with Anorexia Nervosa (AN), seen since 1973 and coming up semiologic criterions of Laboucarie and Dally & Sargant.
(19) He turned to psychoanalysis, David Astor's favoured remedy, and ended up with a psychiatrist, probably the late Peter Dally, who first injected him with methadrine and then – this was the 60s – offered LSD, which was still legal.
(20) The prevalences of three helminths, Campula oblonga, Halocercus dalli and Crassicauda sp., recovered from Dall's porpoises which were net-entrapped incidentally in the vicinity of the Western Aleutian Islands in the northwest Pacific are reported.
Trifle
Definition:
(n.) A thing of very little value or importance; a paltry, or trivial, affair.
(n.) A dish composed of sweetmeats, fruits, cake, wine, etc., with syllabub poured over it.
(n.) To act or talk without seriousness, gravity, weight, or dignity; to act or talk with levity; to indulge in light or trivial amusements.
(v. t.) To make of no importance; to treat as a trifle.
(v. t.) To spend in vanity; to fritter away; to waste; as, to trifle away money.
Example Sentences:
(1) After a relatively trifling lead exposure they developed the signs of acute lead intoxication.
(2) It featured Adam Dalgliesh, the poet-policeman, and he seemed old-fashioned, too, intellectual and a trifle upper-class.
(3) So Inter sold him to Real Madrid at the end of the 1995-96 season for the trifling sum of £3.5million - less than they had paid for him.
(4) 1.15pm: Dave Espley is not a man to be trifled with: "I'd agree with Steven Gardner regarding the use of video technology for goalline reviews, but I'd go slightly further with regard to the retrospective punishment for cheating.
(5) Clementine and dark chocolate trifle (above) This recipe gives classic trifle a zingy twist with clementines and orange blossom; a great make-ahead dinner party dessert.
(6) Of course it is the hyperbolic silliness – the make-or-break trifle sponge, custard thefts, and prolonged ruminations over "The Crumb" – that makes The Great British Bake Off so lovable.
(7) English friends had explained to me, not without pride, the importance of grumbling to the national character, but I still want to stress to every Londoner I meet that — take it from a visiting Los Angeleno — the tube exists, and that counts as no trifling achievement.
(8) But it is a trifle dispiriting even so to hear the education secretary parroting the same lines as his predecessors – even more so for teachers, I guess.
(9) This March, the proportions of loans taken by finance and property slumped all the way to a trifling 74.7%, while non-financial firms took a whopping 25.3%.
(10) It wasn't a baked Alaska, a fruit tart, a cream-laden trifle or a steamed treacle sponge.
(11) If you wish to have only a trifling risk group of 10% of all pregnant women, you can predict right only about 50% of all infants with low birth weight.
(12) Bake Off validates the small quiet dramas of the trifling everyday.
(13) As in most mutinous them-and-us industrial confrontations it had been simmering for years and then boiled over for what seemed the most trifling of reasons.
(14) "And he is at a loss whether to pity a people who take such arrant trifles in good earnest or to envy that happiness which enables a community to discuss them."
(15) I try to answer these letters, but compared to the stories I'm hearing, my experience has been trifling - as more than one correspondent has pointed out.
(16) With the menswear shows in the capital now on their sixth season, such trifles have their place even in the mainstream world of an Arcadia-owned brand.
(17) Some jokey conspiracy theories did the rounds and one YouTube user criticised Hadfield's interpretation of the song as being overly literal (arguably correct, but a trifle harsh, considering).
(18) Clegg was the deputy prime minister and would not jeopardise his relationship with the Conservative party over such a trifle.
(19) And what would become of my mornings in my little corner and my late nights scanning the TV channels, watching my crime shows, not a trifling thing?
(20) But it’s no trifle — especially given the governor’s national ambitions.