Scuffling is brief, untidy grappling and shoving between a few people at close quarters. Scuffling broke out, scuffling in the doorway, sounds of scuffling.
It is smaller than a brawl and less deliberate than a fight — a scuffle is what happens when people push and nobody has decided anything. The word is also used of the sound, which is what you hear through a wall.
1nounscufflingBrief untidy grappling between a few people.
“There was some scuffling outside the pub before the police arrived and separated the two groups.”
scuffling is a struggle.
scuffle Possibly of gmq -/Scandinavian origin; compare Swedish skuff (“a push”) and skuffa (“to push”), from the Proto-Germanic - base skuf-, from Proto-Indo-European skewbʰ-, see also Lithuanian skùbti (“to hurry”), Polish skubać (“to pluck”), Albanian humb (“to lose”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire