Totter
name, noun, verb ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 An unsteady movement or gait. intransitive
- 2 A rag and bone man. archaic, intransitive
- 1 To walk, move or stand unsteadily or falteringly; threatening to fall. intransitive
"The baby tottered from the table to the chair."
- 2 move unsteadily, with a rocking motion wordnet
- 3 To be on the brink of collapse. figuratively, intransitive
"[…]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."
- 4 walk unsteadily, with short steps wordnet
- 5 To collect junk or scrap. archaic, intransitive
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- 6 move without being stable, as if threatening to fall wordnet
- 1 A surname from German.
Example
More examples"And she would whirl and spin and totter around, but she was still standing when Evil Eye Fleagle tried to lay her low with a double whammy."
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.
Borrowed from Austrian German Totter.
Related phrases
More for "totter"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.