Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. to kiss and cuddle.

c.1785		‘The Coughing Old Man’ in A. Carpenter Verse in Eng. in 18C Ireland (1998) 395: Altho’ he lies by me he ne’er can enjoy me, / For still when he is noodling he is killed with the cough.
1788		[as previous].

2. (US, also doodle) to tune a musical instrument, to warm up or improvise musically; usu. as noodling n.; also as n.

1937		Variety Radio Directory 1 344: Noodling, the tuning up of musical instruments with practice runs, trills, scales, etc .
1940		Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith Orchestra [instrumental title] Noodlin’.
1947		E. Condon We Called It Music 85: I got out my banjo. Eberhardt dug up his saxophone and doodled along with me.
1958		Jazz Rev. Nov. 25: Monk [...] allows too many of his favourite piano ‘noodles’ (all pianists seem to have them).
1960		H.O. Brunn Story of the Orig. Dixieland Jazz Band 164: Larry Shields will go down in history as the father of the ‘noodling’ style.
1978		. Charles Brother Ray 177: I finally said to the band [...] ‘Listen, I’m going to fool around and y’all just follow me.’ So I began noodling.
1987		H. Ward q. in Firestone Swing, Swing, Swing (1993) 161: ‘One night Gene [Krupa] just refused to stop drumming, where the tune was supposed to end, so Benny blithely picked up the clarinet and noodled along with him’.
1996		M. Montgomery q. in Govenar & Brakefield Deep Ellum (1998) 44: ‘Uncle Art [Satherley] used to call it ‘noodle’; he’d say ‘noodle on the bridge’ or something. We’d improvise on the melody and the chords, follow the chord progression’.
1996		q. in Govenar & Brakefield Deep Ellum (1998) : .
1999		Guardian G2 31 May 15: You listen [...] and there’s a lot of indiscipline and noodling.
2000		Indep. Rev. 23 Feb. 11: I can noodle on a couple of instruments.

3. to warm up, to excite.

1989

(con. 1960) P. Theroux My Secret Hist. (1990) 151: She did the nameless thing to me and took me into her mouth and lovingly noodled with me.

4. (US) to wander about.

1981

Boston Globe (MA) 10 May 269/5: The dog was just noodling around and not taking interest in things that watchdogs are supposed to take.