Meaning
To dawdle, potter or busy oneself in small aimless movements; to fidget or toy with something (stop fiddling around with those knobs). With with it means to tinker - making small, experimental, often unskilled adjustments (fiddled around with the engine for hours). British English prefers fiddle about. The register is informal and usually a little disapproving, though it can be affectionate about hobbyist tinkering. Informal. Distinguish from fiddle meaning to falsify accounts (fiddle the books) and from fiddle away, which stresses wasting something rather than idle handling. Keep distinct from this site's fiddle while Rome burns. Regional use: Fiddle around chiefly North American; fiddle about chiefly British.
Origin
Built on the verb fiddle in its non-musical sense, to move the hands or fingers restlessly or act aimlessly. That figurative use is old: Etymonline dates it to the 1520s - verified on its archived entry - and Wiktionary's earliest quotation is John Palsgrave's French grammar of 1530, 'Loke you fydell nat with your handes whan your maister speketh to you', already the fiddle-with pattern. The OED's entry for the verb runs from 1377, the noun from around 1275. The particle forms are much later: Google Books shows British fiddle about established by the 1820s, while fiddle around - now the usual North American form - appears from 1868 and is sustained from the early 1890s. Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1930), chapter 6, shows the idiom fully naturalized - 'you're not simply fiddling around by guess and by God' - verified verbatim on Wikisource.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- fiddle about
- fiddle away
- fiddle with
Usage Examples
- Stop fiddling around with the thermostat and call a technician.
- He spent the afternoon fiddling around in the garage, tuning up an old bicycle.
- We do not have time to fiddle around with the wording; the deadline is Friday.