noodles

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of noodle.

   She added fresh noodles to the simmering broth.

   The noodles soaked up all the spicy sauce.

   Note

   Most often met in the plural, because the pasta sense of noodle is itself normally plural: a bowl of noodles, rarely a noodle. The same plural covers the word's broader uses, such as foam pool noodles, other long slender things, an archaic boiled dumpling, and slang for the penis or for a long eastern dragon. It shares its spelling with the verb form (she noodles on the piano), so context decides.

2. 2
   verbcolloquial

   Third-person singular simple present of noodle.

   The keyboardist noodles between songs to keep the crowd warm.

   Whenever an idea stalls, she noodles on it for a few days.

   Note

   The everyday verb here is informal and musical. Someone noodles on a guitar, playing or singing loosely, either with an object (noodles a riff) or without one. In US use it also means turning something over in the mind (noodles a problem). Older senses linger at the edges: "to trick" is obsolete, and "to fool around" is British dialect. It is spelled exactly like the pasta plural.

3. 3
   nouneuphemistic

   Euphemistic form of nudes (nude photographs).

   They joked about trading noodles but never actually did.

   After the breakup, he deleted every set of noodles from his phone.

   Note

   Internet slang that softens a blunt word by swapping in a harmless near-rhyme: nudes becomes noodles. The joke depends on the listener hearing the original, so it works only among people who know the code, in chats, comments and memes. It reads as playful rather than discreet. It lives in the plural, matching nudes, and is best kept to casual online talk.

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