scuffle

1. 1.

   walk by dragging one's feet

   “he shuffled out of the room”

   “We heard his feet shuffling down the hall”

   Synonymsshuffleshamble

   Broaderwalk

   Narrowerscuff
2. 2.

   fight or struggle in a confused way at close quarters

   “the drunken men started to scuffle”

   Synonymstussle

   Broadercontend

Other forms of scuffle

plural

scuffles·

past tense

scuffled·

present participle

scuffling·

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 scuffle

What does scuffle mean?

scuffle means "disorderly fighting". That is the primary sense; the word has 5 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in scuffle?

scuffle has 2 syllables: scuf-fle. The stress falls on "scuf". In IPA it is /ˈskʌfəl/.

What is another word for scuffle?

Close synonyms include hassle, tussle, dogfight, rough-and-tumble, scuffle hoe. 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 scuffle a common word?

scuffle is banded "Uncommon" — turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.