putter

present singular third person putters · participle present puttering · participle past puttered · past puttered

1. intransitiveTo be active, but not excessively busy, at a task or a series of tasks.

   We tiptoed into the house, up the stairs and along the hall to the door of the room where the Professor had been spending so much of his time. 'Twas locked, of course, but the Deacon man got a big bunch of keys out of his pocket and commenced to putter with the lock.

   1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter XIII, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC, pages 304–305

plural putters

1. One who puts or places.

   He was a model of anal defensiveness: fastidious in his dress and appearance, a collector and putter of things in order, a classifier and labeler.

   1995, Leonard Shengold, Delusions of Everyday Life, page 39

   1 more example

   […] for example, Gleitman (1990:30), in support of her claim for universal alignments of syntax and semantics, argues for the universal naturalness of three arguments for 'put' verbs (a putter, a puttee, and a location).

   2012, Anetta Kopecka, Bhuvana Narasimhan, Events of Putting and Taking: A Crosslinguistic Perspective, page 55

2. A shot-putter.
3. businessOne who pushes the small wagons in a coal mine, to transport the coal mined by the getter.

plural putters

1. golfA golf club specifically intended for a putt.
2. golfA person who is taking a putt or putting.

present singular third person putters · participle present puttering · participle past puttered · past puttered

1. intransitiveTo produce intermittent bursts of sound in the course of operating.

   By the time the engine had puttered and died Atkins and some of the others were out of the trenches and walking towards this new wonder machine.

   2010, Pat Kelleher, “‘Some Corner of a Foreign Field …’”, in Black Hand Gang (No Man’s World), Osney Mead, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Abaddon Books, →ISBN

   3 more examples

   Timmy's dad drove an old blue truck that puttered and sputtered to get to the top of the mountain, that led to the valley, where … the WILDCAT waited.

   2010 June 14, Dan Newton, The Wildcat, Bloomington, Ind.: AuthorHouse, →ISBN

   As I reluctantly left Tangkoko for the last time, bumping along the trail on a motorbike, Raoul, the alpha male who had smacked my leg, wandered out from among the trees. He was alone, and after I puttered by, I glanced back to see him swagger into the middle of the path to watch me go.

   2017 March, Jennifer S. Holland, “For These Monkeys, It’s a Fight for Survival”, in National Geographic, archived from the original on 03 May 2017

   My boyfriend, the cello owner, makes little noises while he putters around, which distracts me from reading my 20,000-word long-form articles about Iraq. So I noise-cancel him too.

   2019 May 15, Olga Khazan, “What Happens When You Always Wear Headphones”, in The Atlantic