What's the difference between toddle and totter?

Toddle


Definition:

  • (v. i.) To walk with short, tottering steps, as a child.
  • (n.) A toddling walk.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) So off he toddled with his bindle-stick to play at running away, taking refuge at Sally's house.
  • (2) Being a toddler, she toddled a bit; she knocked over a bottle of Dettol spray, and in a staggering act of pre-school vandalism, broke the nozzle.
  • (3) Thank you, thank you,” he says, then dictates into my tape recorder: “‘You’re a fuckin’ star,’ she says walking by, an attractive young woman in burgundy jeans.” Is there a danger that he’ll lead the masses up the hill, then toddle off to Hollywood and give up on the revolution?
  • (4) Already, my toddling cousins – the people we call "digital natives" today – would pose in front of my phone and make clicking sounds: smart enough to understand what phones should be able to do; stupid enough that they could not see mine was not fit for purpose.
  • (5) She was just standing by the big sash window in her bedroom when she spotted Mrs Thatcher "toddling" around the hospital gardens unguarded.
  • (6) At the Christmas family gathering that year, Grandfather deemed any and all children present who were old enough to walk instead of toddle therefore old enough to sing a carol, recite a poem, and drink a cup of kindness made with brandy, cinnamon, and apples.
  • (7) Updated at 5.50pm BST 5.39pm BST Amid lots of yelping and squealing by idlers on the side of the road, the riders toddle around Versailles.
  • (8) The brands bang on as though they are philanthropists rather than brands seeking to lock down kids as consumers as soon as they can toddle to the pretend bank.
  • (9) Led by her exasperated mother, she toddles in coughing and spluttering helplessly into the doctor’s face.
  • (10) Despite its subject, the short story is funny and thought-provoking, based on the real event when Mantel actually spotted Thatcher "toddling" around the hospital gardens of the Windsor flat she lived in.
  • (11) Like an anxious parent unwilling to trust the house to a teenage son, Italy coach Cesare Prandelli has told Mario Balotelli that he can't risk leaving him behind when he toddles off to the World Cup.
  • (12) She's going to walk along the line with her thank you and bye-bye, then toddle round the side, duck into a limo and she's away.
  • (13) Manager news now and filling Steve McClaren’s shoes at Newcastle will be Rafa Benítez , who’ll keep the Magpies up before toddling off in the summer and paving the way for either David Moyes or Brendan Rodgers (or maybe even both) to take up the reins.
  • (14) The child, rescued from the trafficker, is now toddling around outside the house in just a nappy.
  • (15) Sure, Oxford mathematicians could toddle off to Barclays Capital.
  • (16) 9.18pm GMT 75 min: Neuer has to toddle out of his box against to reach a short back pass.
  • (17) Mitt Romney's merry world tour toddles on today with a visit to Poland.

Totter


Definition:

  • (v. i.) To shake so as to threaten a fall; to vacillate; to be unsteady; to stagger; as,an old man totters with age.
  • (v. i.) To shake; to reel; to lean; to waver.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Most ship-breaking workers are migrants from the north who rent rooms in the warren of makeshift shanties that totter over the water’s edge.
  • (2) The European Union (EU), one of the more promising developments of the post-world war II period, has been tottering because of the harsh effect of the policies of austerity during recession, condemned even by the economists of the International Monetary Fund (if not the IMF’s political actors).
  • (3) In one allele of the tottering locus, a pathogenetic lesion linking noradrenergic hyperinnervation with cortical spike-wave discharges has been identified.
  • (4) The most significant difference from last year's London event is that instead of a tottering and discredited transitional regime, Somalia now has a fully fledged government, led by Hassan Sheikh Mohamud.
  • (5) But the damage of a Greek exit will be out of all proportion to its size, as other dominoes totter, damaging confidence and trade even if they don't fall.
  • (6) As she tottered around a crime scene in high heels, I had the strong feeling that Cubitt, now directing the series as well as writing it, had put out of his mind altogether the cries of misogyny that trailed the first series.
  • (7) It means you can totter into the kitchen to put the kettle on 10 times a day.
  • (8) There are few precedents for such an explosive political ascent in modern western Europe; in Spain, a discredited political elite appears to be tottering.
  • (9) Hippocampal CA3 pyramidal neurons in the adult epileptic mutant mouse tottering (tg) show normal intrinsic membrane properties, yet fire abnormally prolonged paroxysmal depolarizing shifts (PDS) during in vitro exposure to elevated extracellular potassium solutions.
  • (10) Immunocytochemical staining for tyrosine hydroxylase demonstrated the pronounced hyperinnervation in the "tottering" brain, whereas both serotonin and choline acetyltransferase immunostaining were similar between "tottering" and wild type.
  • (11) Leading care and health bodies are demanding crisis talks with ministers over the unravelling of measures in George Osborne ’s spending review that were supposed to prop up the tottering social care system.
  • (12) Older versions of 1980s and 1990s politicians – Lord Carrington, John Prescott – tottered in and out of the chamber.
  • (13) It's not easy and, with Tom and I hoisting him up, we worry that he might totter and fall.
  • (14) But in El Salvador the challenge is exacerbated by tottering public institutions, high rates of sexual violence, inadequate sex education and a backdrop of violence and gang warfare which are undermining efforts to control the outbreak.
  • (15) The two bankers are also heard laughing and joking at a time when the bank was tottering on the brink of destruction.
  • (16) No significant difference in Bmax or Kd values was identified between adult tottering and control mice in any of the tissue preparations.
  • (17) The petit-mal seizures of the "tottering" mutant mouse (tg) have been attributed to an exaggerated noradrenergic projection from locus coeruleus to the telencephalon (Noebels 1984).
  • (18) The tottering mouse resulted from a recessively inherited, autosomal, single-locus mutation which produces a very characteristic neurological and cellular phenotype.
  • (19) Occasionally it is alleged that the billet began to totter during the stroke and that the left hand responded to this stimulus by an unwilled movement to the billet.
  • (20) I see an extremely united front.” Unity is all the more necessary ahead of the Dutch elections in March and the French presidential elections , in the spring in which the anti-EU populists Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen threaten upsets that would, together or separately, represent existential threats to the tottering European project.