What is "dawdle"

Usage examples of "dawdle".

Jessica dawdled until Joseph departed, as he usually did, for the bakehouse, where his younger brother was employed, and the other servants were either in church or on their way to their own Sunday morning diversions.

For two years, until she realized that the wife of Nicholas Bude could be distant, or rude if necessary, Muriel had endured this dawdling social bumbledom of English country life.

He dined at the Cercle Franqais and dawdled over his coffee, hoping Cadbury would turn up.

II When through hot fog the fulgid sun looks down Upon a stagnant earth where listless men Laboriously dawdle, curse, and sweat, Disqualified, unsatisfied, inert, -- It seems to me somehow that God himself Scans with a close reproach what I have done, Counts with an unphrased patience my arrears, And fathoms my unprofitable thoughts.

As she faced him, she held out a hand expectantly for the kaftan, but her husband dawdled as he unfastened the frogs.

I was sorry for this, since it would have given me time and excuse to dawdle there and take a long and satisfying look at what I feel at liberty to say was an array of fresh young comeliness not matchable in another Sunday-school of the same size.

Not as Jamie was now, doddering and nearly toothless, but as he had been twenty years before: old but still capable of clouting you over the River Road if you sassed back or dawdled over a hard pull.

He swung out of his thoughts, looked up and saw Bannerman, as natty a tourist as ever dawdled along the caf6s on the water front.

Tim and his noble guests dawdled over their postprandial wines and cordials in the lamplit dining chamber, tall bonfires threw leaping, dancing shadows in both main and rear courtyards, where lancers and dragoons, Ahrmehnee and Kindred milled and laughed and shouted, gorging themselves on coarse bread and dripping chunks carved from the whole oxen slowly revolving on the spits, guzzling tankards of foaming beer, tart cider and watered wine.

It swooped crabwise across the concrete, missed a dawdling phaeton by a hairbreadth, flashed between two other gyrocars, wiped the fender off a dancing four-wheeler and slammed into the side.

For instance, the King had reason to complain that Faustus, the Praetorian Praefect, was dawdling over the execution of an order which he had received for the shipment of corn from the regions of Calabria and Apulia to Rome.

Dawdling in various stages of undress, some in bra and slacks and some bottomless in shirts, they roamed the bay.

Frankly, it is not a bit nice for a man of position to walk down a respectable thoroughfare, nodding to his acquaintances with dignified composure, when a backward glance has disclosed his kangaroo dog dawdling along at his heels, lithe, svelte and spirituelle, with about ten pounds of stolen sausages hanging festooned from his mouth, and tripping him up from time to time.

For forty miles, up as far as the little border post at Kazungula, the wide river tumbles through rapids and then spreads into dawdling shallows.

While the bloodhounds were dawdling along the trail, untangling it slowly, but with the surety of death, these swift hounds would kill enough food for the entire pack.