Green’s Dictionary of Slang

slightly drunk, tipsy.

1900		‘Doss Chiderdoss’ ‘An Authority on War’ Sporting Times 15 Sept. 1/4: I’ve sometimes gone home ‘tiddley,’ after having faced the foe, / And I’ve faced the old Dutch clock with two bob short!
1910		Sun. Times (Perth) 13 Feb. 2nd sect. 1/1: They Say [...] That as the latter got boozed before departing, they talked when tiddly.
1918		Aussie (France) VIII Oct. 8/1: Once when found drunk in a deshabille condition, he vociferated, ‘I’m not tiddly, I’m Chidley.’.
1925		E. Jervis 25 Years in Six Prisons 25: I went to a ‘boozer’ (public-house) and got tiddley.
1930		E. Waugh Vile Bodies 211: What would the patients think if their sister came in tiddly.
c.1939		B. Bennett ‘The Street of a Thousand Lanterns’ in Billy Bennett’s Third Budget 30: If the tiddley Chinks had too many drinks, They’d go out to see a man about a bow-wow.
1941		N. Mitchison Among You Taking Notes 31 Dec. 174: Red Rob had left, rather tiddly.
1951		(con. 1941) E. Lambert Twenty Thousand Thieves 38: All I know is that I was a little tiddly.
1960		N. Hilliard Maori Girl 184: The trouble is, you get a bit tiddly and then you don’t know what they’re giving you.
1969		P. Boyle All Looks Yellow to the Jaundiced Eye 34: Molly, who only rarely took a drink, was half tiddley.
1970		H.E. Bates A Little of What You Fancy (1985) 469: Edith Pilchester went into The Hare and Hounds and got tiddly.
1982		N. Keesing Lily on the Dustbin 141: I have not heard of any expression specific to a drunken female apart from ‘tiddley.’.
1983		P. Reading 5x5x5x5x5 1iii: Now e gets a bit, / you know, tiddly.
1997		(con. 1960s) A. Frewin London Blues 119: The two girls are both getting a bit tiddly on red wine.
2000		J.J. Connolly Layer Cake 207: He didn’t get a bit tiddly on the Pimms [...] and decide to pop down the bank and withdraw thirteen mill.
2024		J. Meades Empty Wigs (t/s) 750: [I]t dawned on me how tiddly I was.