To wobble means to move unsteadily from side to side, like something that's about to fall over but hasn't quite tipped yet. When a spinning top loses speed, it starts to wobble before it finally topples. A loose tooth wobbles in your mouth before it comes out. A chair with one leg shorter than the others wobbles every time you sit in it.

The word captures that shaky, uncertain motion that makes you wonder if something will stay upright or crash down. A toddler learning to walk wobbles with each step, swaying back and forth as they try to keep their balance. If you stack blocks too high, the tower starts to wobble dangerously before it collapses.

You can also use wobble to describe uncertainty or hesitation in other ways. Someone might say their confidence wobbled when they forgot their lines in the school play, or that their plan started to wobble when unexpected problems appeared. When the wheels came off an old shopping cart and it wobbled down the parking lot, you knew it was barely holding together.

As a noun, a wobble is that unsteady side-to-side motion itself. The word often suggests something temporary: the wobbling might stop and things might steady, or everything might come tumbling down. That in-between quality is what makes wobble such a useful word.