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Various doodles

A doodle is a type of sketch, an unfocused drawing made while a person's attention is otherwise occupied.

The word doodle first appeared in the early seventeenth century to mean a fool or simpleton, and is thought to derive from the Low German dudeltopf, meaning "fool" or "simpleton". This is the meaning meant in the song "Yankee Doodle", originally sung by British colonial troops prior to the American Revolutionary War. This is also the origin of the early eighteenth century verb to doodle, meaning "to swindle or to make a fool of". The modern meaning emerged in the 1930s either from this meaning or from the verb "to dawdle", which since the seventeenth century has had the meaning of wasting time or being lazy.

In the movie "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" Mr. Deeds mentions that "doodle" was a word made up to describe scribblings to help a person think.

In published compilations of their materials, numerous historical figures have left behind doodles. Erasmus drew comical faces in the margins of his manuscripts and John Keats drew flowers in his medical note-books during lectures. Ralph Waldo Emerson, as a student at Harvard, decorated his composition books with somber, classical doodles, such as ornamental scrolls. In one place, he sketched a man whose feet have been bitten off by a great fish swimming nearby and added the caption, “My feet are gone. I am a fish. Yes, I am a fish!”

Other famous doodlers include Sergio Aragonés, who has doodled cartoons in the margins of over 400 issues of MAD Magazine and Jon Burgerman who is best known for his race track on Sony's WipEout Pure PlayStation Portable video game and his books Hello Duudle, made with Danish artist Sune Ehlers.

• Marginalia
• Graphology
• Alien hand syndrome
• Automatic writing
• Split-brain
• Stream of consciousness writing
• Scribble
• Oekaki
• Yankee Doodle

Look up doodle in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Doodle Is Art World Project
• Doodles made by Presidents of the United States
• CBBC children's doodle games
• UK-based charity fundraising event where celebrities' doodles are auctioned

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