dodder

The supporting cast gets to dodder about as magnified versions of Ibsen’s melodramatic figures, with Jamie Smithson a particular hoot as Hedda’s Olympian-grade nerd of a husband.

From Washington Post ● Mar. 25, 2019

And there are the plants that have strayed from their photosynthetic ways and turned to the dark side — the parasites, such as Cuscuta, or dodder.

From Nature ● Feb. 28, 2017

Note that the vines of the dodder, which has white flowers, are beige.

From Textbooks ● Jan. 1, 2015

Lithgow's Tobias is content to dodder on the margins, but when he's forced by Agnes to assume responsibility as head of the house, he summons the necessary strength.

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 20, 2014

I dodder down to the station with Mom as if I’m eighty-nine.

From "Landscape with Invisible Hand" by M.T. Anderson

Scott Ward Abernethy is obviously having a blast channeling Audrey’s sadistic-dentist boyfriend, as well as assorted cameo figures, and Robert John Biedermann dodders aptly as the shop’s cantankerous owner, Mr. Mushnik.

From Washington Post ● Oct. 24, 2019

But now and then, when she fleetingly dodders, or loses her train of thought, she becomes a poignant figure.

From Washington Post ● May 10, 2017

As he dodders round his ex-wife's kitchen in west London, I wonder what that young self would have made of the man he is today.

From The Guardian ● May 21, 2010

There are several kinds of dodders: some live entirely on flax, some on nettles, but those that stick to clover and furze-bushes are the most common in this country.

From Woodside or, Look, Listen, and Learn. by Caroline Hadley

So there he dodders; too cowardly to fly in the face of superstition.

From The Adventures of Kathlyn by Harold MacGrath

Mr. Mueller only doddered around painfully and failed to satisfy Mr. Cohen.

From Washington Times ● Jul. 24, 2019

Her old coot of a husband doddered over to see what the trouble was.

From The New Yorker ● Jun. 25, 2018

Dominic Cavendish of the Telegraph wrote that the Pythons "came, they doddered, but they conquered."

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 2, 2014

Then he doddered on across the moat of the partly burned Palace to bow low before Emperor Hirohito and make a respectful report.

From Time Magazine Archive

Old Worble crooned and doddered, and feebly repeated "Picnic?"

From The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 An Illustrated Monthly by George Newnes

The interview is utterly anodyne, a doddering exchange of pleasantries and carefully selected humanizing anecdotes.

From Slate ● Dec. 18, 2025

Phil Hartman as both the doddering old man and the mastermind of the Iran-Contra plan is perfect.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 4, 2024

This is why nobody was expecting the opening scene of "Top Gun: Maverick" to show the title character, say, doddering around his ailing daylily farm.

From Salon ● Jun. 3, 2022

It is still, depending on your preferences, a doddering throwback or an oasis of old-school rationality and calm.

From New York Times ● May 5, 2022

I thought of the doddering old war veterans who sat along the gallery in front of the cotton gin and spat their tobacco and bored everybody with the same stories they’d been telling for decades.

From "The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate" by Jacqueline Kelly