8 Words for Walking with Surprising Origins

When you walk, do you amble? Meander? Shuffle? Trundle? I definitely trundle. I walk almost every day, and when it's time, my husband always asks, "Are you ready to trundle?" And if he's being really funny, he'll say "Get ready to trundle!" in an announcer voice, as if we're heading out to something as exciting as a wrestling match.

1. Trundle

"Trundle" the verb comes from "trundle" the noun, which first appeared in the year 1564 to describe a trundle bed because it referred to small wheels or rollers, and a trundle bed is a bed on rollers that you can move around, often rolling it underneath another bed for storage and pulling it out when you need it. 

The walking meaning of the word didn't appear until more than a hundred years later in 1680. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), one meaning is to walk with a rolling gait, so that's how we get from physical wheels or rollers to a way of walking.

2. Walk

Like many words for very basic things we do, the verb "walk" is old. The first written example of "walk" to mean "move about on foot" goes back to about 1200, but the OED speculates that it had that meaning earlier, and it was just used colloquially and wasn't written down.

It had other meanings that were written down earlier though. Going all the way back to Old English, written examples include "to walk" meaning "to roll," "to turn over," "to toss something," and "to wrap around something."

3. Amble

"Amble" popped up in the 1300s and first referred to something a horse did. It wasn't until 1576 that it came to refer to people who moved in a smooth, steady way at moderate speed, suggestive of how a horse moves.

4. Shuffle

"Shuffle" appeared in 1598, and according to the OED, its first use was to describe a way of walking. The origin of "shuffle" is unclear, but multiple sources say it could come from the German word "schuffeln," meaning to walk clumsily or with dragging feet, or it could be the frequentative form of the verb "to shove." 

I had to look up what "frequentative" means! That's a verb form that indicates repetition, so if you're shuffling, the idea is that you're making the motion of a series of little shoves. 

Other frequentatives are "prickle," as in you get a prickle on the back of your neck instead of just one prick. "Sniffle," which is a series of sniffs, and "sparkle," which is more than just one spark. Frequentatives often end with "-le" (like "sparkle,"...

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