0 past simple and past participle of stumble --
1 to step awkwardly while walking or running and fall or begin to fall: --
2 to make a mistake, such as repeating something or pausing for too long, while speaking or playing a piece of music: --
The stranger attempted to prolong the exchange, perhaps believing he had stumbled across a potential patron.
I stumbled across biology by chance at a dinner party.
I am like a child in a children's book who has stumbled through a gap in reality and fallen headlong into another world.
By the end of 1989 the reform process stumbled.
Sometimes, they stumbled into enemy territory because they did not know where the foe was, or even exactly where they themselves were.
The party had stumbled along with a membership of between 3,000 and 5,000 for most of the first fiveand-a-half years after its formation in 1920.
One utterance was discarded because the speaker stumbled and corrected himself in the middle of the sentence.
I seemed to have stumbled on a way to gather data to generate plausible new ideas.