Other forms: doodles, doodling
A doodle is an aimless drawing made while thinking about something else. Boxes, spirals, and a face in the margin.
Telephone calls and long meetings produce most of them. Research suggests doodling actually helps concentration rather than hindering it, which is a useful thing to be able to cite. The word works as a verb too. It gave its name to the changing illustrations on a well-known search engine's home page, which is now the commonest use of the word by a long way.
Low German
dudeldopp — simpleton
English, today
doodle
Originally dialectal, from Low German dudeldopp (“simpleton”). Influenced by dawdle. Compare also German dudeln (“to play (the bagpipe)”). The word doodle first appeared in the early 17th century to mean a fool or simpleton. German variants of the etymon include Dudeltopf, Dudentopf, Dudenkopf, Dude and Dödel. American English dude may be a derivation of doodle. The meaning "fool, simpleton" is intended in the song title "Yankee Doodle", originally sung by British colonial troops prior to the American Revolutionary War. This is also the origin of the early eighteenth century verb to doodle, meaning "to swindle or to make a fool of". The modern meaning emerged in the 1930s either from this meaning or from the verb "to dawdle", which since the seventeenth century has had the meaning of wasting time or being lazy.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Man Called Ove
First appears in chapter 15 of A Man Called Ove.
Practise this word