Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The act of writing hastily and carelessly.
  • noun The first coarse teasing or carding which wool or cotton receives.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Writing hastily or poorly.
  • noun The act of writing hastily or idly.
  • noun The act or process of carding coarsely.
  • noun the machine used for the first carding of wool or other fiber; -- called also scribbler.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun That which has been scribbled, written in a scrawled or careless hand.
  • verb Present participle of scribble.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • January 28th, 2010 at 3: 55 pm belaccifer lacca says: jwest - some napkin scribbling says that your 500 new nuclear reactors will run about 7 billion each.

    Think Progress » Demoralizing His Supporters, Obama Calls Nukes, Coal, And Oil Drilling ‘Clean Energy Jobs’ 2010

  • What I had seen in her notebook—slashes, dashes, and tiny loops all cramped together—looked like gibberish, but since she called her scribbling “medical theories,” I thought possibly she could be right: it could be a kind of formula.

    Fleur De Leigh’s Life of Crime Diane Leslie 1999

  • Perhaps 90 percent of the scribbling is the work of "taggers," or kids who mark their initials as a form of youthful rebellion.

    Scorecard 2008

  • Sometimes she could be seen with a despairing expression scribbling rapidly in her lock-up dairy.

    Within the Tides Joseph Conrad 1890

  • The director favoured unorthodox methods of working, such as scribbling new dialogue on scraps of paper and handing them to the actors just before a take.

    Films of Michael Caine #70: The Debtors DAVID BISHOP 2007

  • Gavston or Gauston twice encised, but to this "scribbling" Mr Weston S. Walford, who has a note on this tomb in the fifteenth volume of the

    Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See Philip Walsingham Sergeant 1912

  • As he wrote in after years: “I had acquired from early boyhood the idea that it was expected of me to become a pianist, and every moment spent in 'scribbling' seemed to be stolen from the more legitimate work of piano practice.”

    Edward MacDowell Gilman, Lawrence, 1878-1939 1908

  • As he wrote in after years: "I had acquired from early boyhood the idea that it was expected of me to become a pianist, and every moment spent in 'scribbling' seemed to be stolen from the more legitimate work of piano practice."

    Edward MacDowell Lawrence Gilman 1908

  • She could see no sense in taking the best hours of the day for "scribbling," and it was only in the later years when Father had a steady income from his writings that her point of view softened.

    My Boyhood John Burroughs 1879

  • "It should also make ebooks more relevant for education by simplyfing functions such as scribbling marginalia."

    AppleInsider 2009

Comments

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  • Never was there such a pair of scribbling lovers as we--- yet perhaps whom it so much concerns to keep from each other what each writes.

    Lovelace to Belford, Clarissa by Samuel Richardson

    December 4, 2007