Skip to content
OneKitly

chuckle

nounverbadjectivecommon in dialogue

  • //ˈt͡ʃʌkəl//

A quiet laugh.

noun

  1. 1

    A quiet laugh.

Etymology

From chuck (“laugh”) + -le.

verb

  1. 1

    To laugh quietly or inwardly.

  2. 2

    To communicate through chuckling.

    She chuckled her assent to my offer as she got in the car.

  3. 3

    archaicTo make the sound of a chicken; to cluck.

  4. 4

    archaicTo call together, or call to follow, as a hen calls her chickens; to cluck.

    if these Birds are within distance, here's that will chuckle 'em together

  5. 5

    archaicTo fondle; to indulge or pamper.

adjective

  1. 1

    obsoleteClumsy.

Etymology

Perhaps from chock (“a log”).

Forms

plural
chuckles
comparative
more chuckle
superlative
most chuckle
past tense
chuckled
past participle
chuckled
present participle
chuckling
third person singular
chuckles
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).