Other forms: tottering, tottered, totters
To totter is to move unsteadily, as though about to fall. Small wavering steps and nothing quite under control.
It suits the very old, the very young and the very drunk, and it is gentler and more comic than stagger. Buildings totter too, meaning they are about to collapse. The figurative use is common in political writing, since a tottering government is one about to fall. The adjective tottering describes both. Toddler comes from the same family of words about unsteady walking.
Totter has been unsteady for a thousand years. Old English tealtrian meant to totter or to waver, and the form is a frequentative: a verb built to describe something done over and over.
Proto-Germanic
*taltrōną
Old English
tealtrian — to totter, vacillate
Middle English
totren
English, today
totter
Built from
From Middle English totren, toteren, from earlier tolteren (compare dialectal English tolter (“to struggle, flounder”); Scots tolter (“unstable, wonky”)), from Old English tealtrian (“to totter, vacillate”), from Proto-Germanic taltrōną, a frequentative form of Proto-Germanic taltōną (“to sway, dangle, hesitate”), from Proto-Indo-European del-, dul- (“to shake, hesitate”). Cognate with Dutch touteren (“to tremble”), Norwegian - dialectal totra (“to quiver, shake”), frr talt, tolt (“unstable, shaky”). Related to tilt.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Man Called Ove, Ways of Moving
First appears in chapter 2 of A Man Called Ove.
Practise this word