Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Informal Lacking importance or significance; trifling: a footling gesture.
- adj. Informal Stupid; inept.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A small foot.
- n. Anything no bigger than one's foot.
- Having the foot foremost: applied in obstetrics to cases in which a foot presents.
- n. One of the strips of board which run longitudinally on top of the frames in the bottom of a boat.
Wiktionary
- adj. Trivial; unimportant; useless; silly; inept; irritating.
- v. present participle of footle.
- n. A fetus oriented so that, at birth, its feet will emerge first. A type of breech birth.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. small and of little importance.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. (informal) small and of little importance
Etymologies
- foot + -ling. (Wiktionary)
- Present participle of footle. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“JUNO [huffily] I don't know what you call footling --”
“I would rather we attempt big, serious change and fail, than fiddlearound with footling, meaningless promises, limping through office andclinging to power for the sake of it.”
Yahoo! News: Latest news headlines News Headlines | Top Stories
“While pacifying those who worry about liberty with a footling commission, composed largely of lawyers from left and right, who cancel each other out, Clarke proposes a vast extension of secrecy in the civil courts and inquests, which will suppress evidence of corruption and negligence in high places, as well as reduce access to justice and the public's right to know.”
The Guardian: Ken Clarke is ready to betray 800 years of British justice | Henry Porter
“This is really not the time for such games; for footling schemes and yet more fraudulent job creation initiatives involving the spending of money Britain doesn't have.”
The Wall Street Journal: What's in Alistair Darling's future?
“Yet the freedoms which Englishmen have won over nearly eight hundred years have now been sold to a couple of Labour fellow-travellers for their votes so that the UK will now soften its policy towards Cuba and the issue of the all too footling sanctions against Cuba the EU maintains as a fig-leaf.”
“This is no mere technical detail of footling importance: it goes to the very heart of the legitimacy of the Parliament which for now claims to have authority in this land and as such this matter will not go away.”
“As for the British people and their footling objections to this most wonderful of treaties, why, a pox on them!”
“Hague took her to task on footling, no-brainer issues.”
“On Kelly he flannelled about some footling detail of parliamentary timing.”
“Finally, I leave you with these little gems from one of the earliest of the Euro Nabobery, Charles de Gaulle, who knew a thing or two about when and when not to ask the people for their views, though with his last referendum, a footling thing too, he came a cropper:”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘footling’.
-
phrontistery - f
from phrontistery.info
fabaceous, fabiform, fabulist, faburden, face-cord, facetiae, facia, facinorous, factious, factitious, factitive, factive and 418 more...
-
kewpid's Words
moleskine, araldite, dessicate, cellar door, grotesque, fallacy, vendetta, raindrop, panacea, ethereal, hircus, treppenwitz and 446 more...
-
sionnach's Words
contumely, fomite, holmgang, poltroon, eleemosynary, obsidian, nugatory, grindcore, felch, recrudescent, pyx, parenteral and 3271 more...
-
my words
interminable, effete, convocation, philistines, malaise, foibles, deputation, anathematized, morass, stalwart, proselytize, abet and 405 more...
-
SAVED FAVES
Listless no more,
arrears, addle, akimbo, allure, appurtenance, bibelot, bibulous, bifurcate, blither, boodle, crapulous, coprolite and 122 more...
-
The Amulet of Samarkand
Words and phrases from Jonathan Stroud's The Amulet of Samarkand.
flunky, provenance, pare, rabbit in a covert, short shrift, bunker, trainers, tatty, lob, injunction, doss, bluster and 193 more...
-
Adjectival Arcana
A roster of adjectives that infrequently surface in typical conversation and writing. Many are dredged from scientific or other technical jargon or sieved from examples of disused archaic forms.
unitegmic, acaulescent, reticuloendothelial, ingressive, uniate, acanthopterygian, ossific, epiphysial, perivisceral, acœlomatous, cestoid, acælomate and 7756 more...
-
The Good Soldier
Words taken from The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford.
concatenation, vorticist, imagiste, auk, acquaintanceship, perforce, tapageu, jeunes, minuet, outsound, sedulous, goodheartedness and 105 more...
-
Orphanage of neglected words, starved...
The words on this list need to get out more. Seriously, I can't believe I'm the only person listing them. Won't you please consider offering them a playdate with some of your words? Surely you have...
grog blossom, hellspawn, hellespont, embryology, hamfisted, topkapi, footling, fancier, lindisfarne, krispy kreme, mortal coil, byline and 29 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for footling.
plethora Well I wasn't thinking about that until you said it! Jan 4, 2009
sionnach
Not to be confused with footlong.
Go ahead. I dare you not to think of genitalia. Jan 4, 2009