Other forms: drawling, drawled
To drawl is to speak slowly, stretching the vowels out. Every word taking longer than it needs to.
The word is strongly associated with the American South, and a southern drawl is a fixed phrase, though it describes a real feature of the accent rather than an affectation. Used of anybody else it usually suggests boredom or a deliberate coolness, so drawling an answer sounds superior. As a noun a drawl is the manner of speaking itself, and it appears constantly in dialogue tags.
1verbdrawlTo speak slowly with drawn-out vowel sounds.
“He drawled the words as though nothing mattered.”
2nounlengthenedA slow way of speaking with lengthened vowels.
“She answered in a lazy drawl.”
Middle English
drawen
English
draw
English, today
drawl
Built from
From a modern frequentative form of draw, equivalent to draw + le. Compare draggle. Compare also Dutch dralen (“to drag out, delay, linger, tarry, dawdle”), Old Danish dravle (“to linger, loiter”), Icelandic dralla (“to loiter, linger”). draw comes from Middle English drawen. The verb is derived from Middle English dragen, draghen, draue, drauen, drauhen, drawe, drawen, draȝe, draȝen, draȝhenn (“to drag, pull; to draw (out); to attract; to entice, lure; to lead; to make a drawing; to move, travel; etc.”), from Old English dragan (“to drag, draw”), from Proto-West Germanic dragan (“to carry, haul”), from Proto-Germanic draganą (“to carry, draw, pull”); further etymology uncertain, often said to be from Proto-Indo-European dʰregʰ- (“to drag, pull, run”), but possibly from a non-Indo-European substrate root which is also the source of Latin trahō (“to pull, draw; etc.”). a doublet of drag and draught. The noun is derived from Middle English drau, draue (“action of shooting with a bow”), from drauen, drawen.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA