Other forms: waggling
To waggle is to move rapidly from side to side. Waggle your fingers, waggled his eyebrows, a waggle of the tail.
It is quick, small and usually comic — waggling eyebrows and fingers are both faintly ridiculous. The waggle dance of the honeybee is the real technical use: a returning forager waggles along a straight run whose angle and length tell the hive where the food is, which is one of the great findings in animal behaviour.
1verbwaggleTo move rapidly from side to side.
“The baby laughed and waggled her feet in the air.”
waggle is a quick side-to-side movement.
Middle English wagelen is wag plus -le, a frequentative ending meaning to do repeatedly. Wag and wiggle are relatives.
Middle Low German
wagelen
Middle English
wagelen
English, today
waggle
From Middle English wagelen (attested in wagelyng), possibly a borrowing of Middle Low German wagelen; equivalent to wag + le. Compare continental equivalents Middle High German wacken (> Danish vakle, German wackeln), Swedish vagla, West Frisian waggelje, Low German wackeln, Dutch waggelen.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA