Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • intransitive verb To talk foolishly; prate.
  • noun Foolish, trivial, or idle talk or chatter.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To babble; gabble; prate; especially, to keep up a foolish, prosy chatter.
  • noun A twaddler.
  • noun Idle, senseless talk; gabble; prosy nonsense.
  • noun Perplexity; confusion. Grose, Dict. of Vulgar Tongue.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun Silly talk; gabble; fustian.
  • verb To talk in a weak and silly manner, like one whose faculties are decayed; to prate; to prattle.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Empty or silly idle talk or writing; nonsense, rubbish
  • noun A twaddler.
  • verb To talk or write nonsense; to prattle.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun pretentious or silly talk or writing
  • verb speak (about unimportant matters) rapidly and incessantly

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Probably variant of dialectal twattle, perhaps alteration of tattle.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

1782, by alteration of twattle (1556), of unknown origin.

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Examples

Comments

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  • This word always sounds dirty to me.

    December 13, 2006

  • first heard this one on Red Dwarf -- a late 80's-early 90's britcom.

    February 4, 2007

  • andrew.simone, there's a good reason for that - it sounds like twat!

    I love this word, both because it means nonsense and because it's one of the few words that rhymes with waddle - it's a waddling twat!

    I remember Topps made a series of toys (over 10 years ago now) called Baby Wild Animals - they came with little candy baby bottles, and the seal was named Twaddle. This cracked me up endlessly.

    May 4, 2007

  • Found a great new synonym for this - taradiddle!

    September 10, 2007

  • appears in the iphone game Moxie; a fun word game. It's also frustrating because it exclaims "twaddle!" at you when you enter a word which it doesn't recognize, but that actually is a word!

    July 23, 2009

  • They have only two varieties of pizza here — regular and extra cheese. None of this new age southern California olives-and-sun-dried-tomato wannabe pizza twaddle.

    --Elizabeth Gilbert, 2006, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything across Italy, India and Indonesia, p. 80

    August 10, 2009

  • I lived in Italy for 4 years and never came across a pizzeria that offered extra cheese. Maybe you could find that option if you haunted tourist dives religiously but, frankly Liz, it's extra cheese which represents 'wannabe pizza twaddle', while olives are quite a traditional ingredient.

    August 10, 2009

  • The example is rather hilarious: "The solemn unction with which he pronounced this twaddle is beyond description."

    November 19, 2009

  • "I have no right to do so … it is inappropriate to twaddle, toy and tool anyone's (sp) object. " — newmatilda.com

    November 19, 2009