dillydally

1. 1.

   postpone doing what one should be doing

   “He did not want to write the letter and procrastinated for days”

   Synonymsprocrastinatestalldrag one's feetdrag one's heelsshillyshallydilly-dally

   Broaderdelay

   Narrowerprocrastinate

Other forms of dillydally

past tense

dillydallied·

present participle

dillydallying·

third person

dillydallies·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about dillydally

What does dillydally mean?

dillydally means "postpone doing what one should be doing".

How many syllables are in dillydally?

dillydally has 4 syllables: dil-ly-dal-ly. The stress falls on "dil". In IPA it is /ˈdɪliˈdæli/.

What is another word for dillydally?

Close synonyms include procrastinate, stall, drag one's feet, drag one's heels, shillyshally. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is dillydally a common word?

dillydally is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.

What rhymes with dillydally?

1 word rhymes with dillydally. Rhymes are matched on the phonemes from the last stressed vowel onward, which is the definition a reader has in their head.