totter
/ˈtɑtɚ/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.15 in modern English
6
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
2
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "The baby tottered from the table to the chair."
- "The old man tottered out of the pub into the street."
- "The car tottered on the edge of the cliff."
- "Manganism has been known about since the 19th century, when miners exposed to ores containing manganese, a silvery metal, began to totter, slur their speech and behave like someone inebriated."
- "[…]the folly of this Iland, they ſay there's but fiue vpon this Iſle ; we are three of them, if th' other two be brain'd like vs, the State totters."
- "By the latter part of 1848, the throne of Hudson the Railway King who had been called in in 1845 as a superman to save the Eastern Counties Railway, was tottering to its fall, [...]."
Etymology
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”), North Frisian talt, tolt (“unstable, shaky”). Related to tilt.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈtɑtɚ/
- British English: /ˈtɒtə/