foozle

(This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.)

• Audio (AU)

  (file)

foozle (third-person singular simple present foozles, present participle foozling, simple past and past participle foozled)

1. To do something clumsily or awkwardly; to bungle.
   • 1921 October 2, “One-handed drivers menace to public”, in Vancouver Sun, Canada, retrieved 30 Aug. 2011, page 17:

     Every baseball fan is acquainted with the sarcastic reminder, "two hands are the fashion nowadays," often hurled at the infielder who foozles an attempt at a grandstand play in the form of a one-handed catch.

   • c. 1900, F. Anstey, Humor and Fantasy:

     I wouldn't have trusted dear old Monty to break the death of a bluebottle without managing to foozle it somehow.

foozle (plural foozles)

1. A fogey.
   • 1838, Denis Ignatius Moriarty, The Wife Hunter:

     There is an old foozle of a lord, the earl of Ballyduff, who lives in London, and who is determined on nominating to his vacant borough

2. A mistaken shot in golf.
   • 1923, Stacy Aumonier, Odd Fish:

     Even poor Mr. Lloyd George cannot go out of his front door, or make a foozle on the ninth green, without being snapshotted, sketched, and probably filmed.

3. (video games, slang) The final boss character in a game.
   • 2005, William Abner, Gamer's Tome of Ultimate Wisdom 2006:

     The original Ultima was a kill-the-foozle type of game where the goal was to destroy the Gem of Power, which was held by an evil wizard named Mondain.

• John A. Simpson and Edmund S. C. Weiner, editors (1989), “foozle”, in The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, →ISBN.