Other forms: ambling, ambles, ambled
To amble is to walk slowly because nothing is chasing you. A dog ambling along a hedge and sniffing every third bush; two friends ambling home from the pub with nowhere to be.
The word carries the mood rather than the speed — someone can amble along quite briskly and still be ambling, because what makes it an amble is the absence of purpose. It goes with along, over, up and down: he ambled over to the bar, she ambled down the lane. There is a noun too, an amble round the garden after lunch. Before it belonged to people it belonged to horses, and an amble is still the technical name for a horse's smooth, unhurried gait. Do not mix it up with ramble: a ramble is a long country walk, and a rambling story is one that has lost its way.
1verbambleTo walk at an easy, unhurried pace.
“We ambled along the river until it got dark.”
2nounslowA slow, unhurried walk.
“He took an amble round the block before bed.”
3nounhorsesA horse's smooth, unhurried gait.
“The pony dropped out of a trot into an amble.”
amble is a way of walking.
Amble came through Middle English amblen from Old French ambler, which meant to walk the way a horse walks, and before that Old Occitan amblar and Latin ambulō, to walk. English later borrowed the Latin verb a second time in its Sunday clothes, as ambulate. So the most relaxed human walk in the language began as a description of hooves.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₂elh₂-
Latin
ambulō — to walk
Old Occitan
amblar
Old French
ambler — walk as a horse does
Middle English
amblen
English, today
amble
From Middle English amblen, from Old French ambler (“walk as a horse does”), from Old Occitan amblar, from Latin ambulō (“to walk”). a doublet of ambulate.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Man Called Ove, Ways of Moving, Horses & Riding
First appears in chapter 17 of A Man Called Ove.
Practise this word