Other forms: puddles
A puddle is the small pool of rainwater on the street that children love to jump in. Jump in a puddle, a muddy puddle, puddles after the rain.
It exists because the ground below is sealed — clay, compacted soil or tarmac — so the water has nowhere to go. In building, to puddle clay is to work it until it holds water, which is how canals were made watertight.
1nounpuddleA small pool of rainwater.
“The children jumped in every puddle on the way home.”
puddle is a pool.
Middle English podel is a diminutive of Old English pudd, a ditch.
Proto-Germanic
*puddaz
Old English
pudd — ditch
Middle English
podel
English, today
puddle
From Middle English podel, diminutive of Old English pudd (“ditch”), from Proto-Germanic puddaz (compare Low German Pudel (“puddle”), Middle High German podel (“quagmire, mudhole”), hrx Puttel, dialectal German Pfudel (“puddle”), German pudeln (“to splash about”)), ultimately imitative of the sound.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA