1902 Geol. Surv. No. 177 (Queensland Dept. Mines) 20 Some splendid opal is found..by turning over and searching the old heaps and mullock—‘noodling’.

1948 E. F. Murphy They struck Opal 129 A visiting geologist tabbed these ‘nodules’, and explained that they had originally formed inside a soft stone (like yowah nuts), which had later decomposed. The miners soon altered the name to ‘noodles’—and hence the ‘noodling’ game.

1975 ‘N. Culotta’ Gone Gougin' 22 Noodlin' means pickin' over the old mullock. Abos are the best at it.

2002 Sunday Mail (S. Austral.) (Nexis) 6 Jan. (Features section) 79 Opal Festival time is when the town really turns on a show, from noodling competitions to street parades.

1937 N.Y. Times 21 Mar. xi. 4/3 Noodling is a kind of Afro-American yodeling. It takes place when the swing singer becomes so carried away with her song that she leaves the written music and improvises vocal embroideries, dulcet whoops, sweet yelps and other wild ululations that put more élan into it.

1940 D. Newlin Schoenberg Remembered (1980) It relies too exclusively..on the ‘noodling’ (Boulanger) method instead of on the ‘blooming’ (Schoenberg) method.

1946 R. Blesh Shining Trumpets (1949) ix. 212 Shield's clarinet part..revolves in little runs around lead notes (this is called ‘noodling’).

1960 H. O. Brunn Story Orig. Dixieland Jazz Band 164 Larry Shields will go down in history as the father of the ‘noodling’ style and possessor of one of the most powerful clarinet tones on record.

1983 Listener 21 July 34/2 The solo part ranges stylistically from neo-Bach by way of waltz and ragtime to something very like nightclub noodling.

1999 Times 16 July 36/5 The musicians..played a succession of themes ranging from ambient synthesizer noodling to throbbing industrial techno.

1942 L. V. Berrey & M. Van den Bark Amer. Thes. Slang §158/1 Nobby noodling, clever thinking.

1960 R. Matheson Beardless Warriors 231 Let me do the noodling, right?

1976 National Observer (U.S.) 21 Aug. 17/5 Bubber answers his questions.., but not without Arkin indulging in a fair amount of shaky and rather pretentious anthropomorphic noodling.

1994 Esquire Mar. 170/1 Coupland's coinages may have great resonance for his cohorts, but they strike me as McDull, the irritating noodlings of a terminally clever teenage sociologist.

1998 Los Angeles Times (Electronic ed.) 8 Dec. Abrahams grips us so closely, line by line, making everything hyper-real—a doubles tennis match, Whitey's halfway house in Florida, Roger's computer noodling, [etc.].

1937 Amer. Speech 12 162 In the state of Arkansas..noodling is the process of catching fish by reaching into the water and grasping them by the gills with the thumb and forefinger.

1950 Ecol. Monogr. 20 35/2 Hatchlings..were captured by collectors wading in shallow water... Another type of hand collecting, ‘noodling’ or ‘muddling’ produced excellent results in late summer or winter.

1951 R. Conant Reptiles of Ohio 160 Professional turtle collectors take them [sc. softshell turtles] by ‘noodeling,’ in traps, nets, or on set lines.

1987 W. Childress Out of Ozarks 28 There were two kinds of noodling practiced during my Midwest childhood—one using an encircling seine and bare hands and another with a breakable stick attached to a hook and line.

1992 In-Fisherman Feb. 17/1 Noodling, grabbing, or hand fishing is a traditional way of catching catfish.

2001 Sports Afield (Electronic ed.) 224 An initiative before the Missouri Department of Conservation would legalize handfishing—or ‘noodling’ as it is known locally.