Other forms: stuttering, stuttered, stutters
To stutter is to get stuck on a sound and repeat it — b-b-but, w-w-wait — while the rest of the sentence stands waiting its turn. It shows up worst under pressure: saying your own name, ordering at a counter, the first second of a phone call.
There is a noun as well: he has a stutter, she spoke with a slight stutter. In Britain, stammer is the commoner word for the same thing, and the two swap freely. Machines stutter too — the engine stuttered and died, the video stuttered halfway through — which means running in broken little bursts. When you are talking about people, say a person who stutters rather than 'a stutterer'; it is a speech condition, nothing to do with nerves or intelligence, and the wording matters to the people it describes.
1verbstutterTo repeat sounds or get stuck on them while speaking.
“He stuttered on the first word and then the rest of the sentence came out clean.”
synonyms: stammer
2nounconditionA speech condition in which sounds are repeated or blocked.
“She has had a stutter since childhood and it barely shows now.”
3verbengineOf an engine or machine: to run in broken, uneven bursts.
“The old mower stuttered twice and cut out.”
Stutter goes back to Middle English stutten or stoten, which already meant to stutter, and Dutch kept a cousin of it in stotteren. The -er hanging on the end is the ending English gives to actions that repeat in small bursts — mutter, patter, flutter.
Middle English
stutten, stoten — stutter
English, today
stutter
From Middle English stutten, stoten (“stutter”); cognate with Dutch stotteren (“stutter”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Man Called Ove, Ways of Speaking
First appears in chapter 17 of A Man Called Ove.
Practise this word