Definition of "putter"

We tiptoed into the house, up the stairs and along the hall into 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.: A[lbert] L[evi] Burt Company, pages 304–305

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

[…] 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

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

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

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 3 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