Deeds Goes to Town, the main character explains the concept of 'doodling' to a judge unfamiliar with the word, saying that 'People draw the most idiotic pictures when they're thinking.' The character, who has travelled from a fictional town in Vermont, describes the word doodler as being 'a name we made up back home' for people who make 'foolish designs' on paper when their mind is on something else. In the final courtroom scene of the 1936 film Mr. That led to the more generalized verb 'to doodle', which means to do nothing. The modern meaning emerged as a term for a politician who was doing nothing in office at the expense of his constituents. It is the origin of the early eighteenth-century verb to doodle, meaning 'to swindle or to make a fool of'. It may derive from the German Dudeltopf or Dudeldop, meaning simpleton or noodle (literally 'nightcap'). The word doodle first appeared in the early 17th century to mean a fool or simpleton.

Most people who doodle often remake the same shape or type of doodle throughout their lifetime. Popular kinds of doodles include cartoon versions of teachers or companions in a school, famous TV or comic characters, invented fictional beings, landscapes, geometric shapes, patterns, textures, or phallic scenes.

Other common examples of doodling are produced during long telephone conversations if a pen and paper are available.

Typical examples of doodling are found in school notebooks, often in the margins, drawn by students daydreaming or losing interest during class. Despite this, it is not uncommon to see such behavior with adults, in which case it is generally done jovially, out of boredom. Doodles are simple drawings that can have concrete representational meaning or may just be composed of random and abstract lines or shapes, generally without ever lifting the drawing device from the paper, in which case it is usually called a scribble.ĭoodling and scribbling are most often associated with young children and toddlers, because their lack of hand–eye coordination and lower mental development often make it very difficult for any young child to keep their coloring attempts within the line art of the subject. 1795Ī doodle is a drawing made while a person's attention is otherwise occupied. Doodle by Luise von Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Queen of Prussia, c.

Simple flower doodle