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dumpling

nounattested in dialogue

  • //ˈdʌmp.lɪŋ//

A ball of dough that is cooked and may have a filling and/or additional ingredients in the dough. Specifically, a ball of dough used in stews and other sauced dishes; a thick noodle.

noun

  1. 1

    A ball of dough that is cooked and may have a filling and/or additional ingredients in the dough. Specifically, a ball of dough used in stews and other sauced dishes; a thick noodle.

  2. 2

    A ball of dough that is cooked and may have a filling and/or additional ingredients in the dough. Specifically, a food composed of a dough wrapper around a filling.

  3. 3

    A term of endearment.

    My little dumpling.

  4. 4

    A piece of excrement.

    2018 Brent Butt as Brent Herbert Leroy, "Sasquatch Your Language", Corner Gas Animated Wherever legitimate tracks are found there's always some fresh scat, y'know, poo, flop, dumplings.

Etymology

A folk word, first attested in c. 1600s, apparently from a Norfolk (East Anglian) dialect, of uncertain origin: * perhaps from some Low German word (compare dümpeln (“bobbing up and down”)), * or from the rare dialectal adjective dump (“lump, of the consistency of dough”) (first attested in the late 1800s), + -ling (diminutive suffix), although dumpling is recorded much earlier. However, compare dumpy (“short and stout”).

Forms

plural
dumplings
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).