'Dribs and drabs' origin search

[Alex_B]

As if the thread title didn’t explain: does anyone know the origin of the phrase ‘dribs and drabs’?

I’ve been searching Google on and off this morning but with no luck. Any ideas?
Alex B

[Thylacine]

That one is a tad convoluted.

There was an archaic word drib which meant to fall in drops or drip. That lead to driblet meaning a small amount or a drop, humans being humans that may be how we got back to dribs meaning a tiny amount (but nobody seems really sure, it may have been a more direct trip). People kept right on being people and dribs had the same second word with different vowel treatment as tit for tat or flim-flam for the sound effect and there you have it, English at its finest

[_shaolin]

Why do things that trickle come in “dribs and drabs”?
Because it sounds good. Really.

Both drib and drab mean ‘a small quantity or amount’; the phrase dribs and drabs, which first appears in the nineteenth century, means ‘small and usually irregular amounts’. The earlier word is drib, which is first attested in the early eighteenth century. Drib is probably a back formation from driblet or dribble, both of which come from the verb drib ‘to fall or flow in small amounts; trickle’; drib is probably an onomatopoeic variant of drip.

The word drab is first recorded in the early nineteenth century. It is probably a gradational variant of drib, that is, one based on a change in the vowel.

From here.