Meaning

noun small balls or strips of boiled or steamed dough

noun dessert made by baking fruit wrapped in pastry

originA folk word, first attested in c. 1600s, apparently from a Norfolk (East Anglian) dialect, of uncertain origin: * perhaps from some Low German word (compare dümpeln (“bobbing up and down”)), * or from the rare dialectal adjective dump (“lump, of the consistency of dough”) (first attested in the late 1800s), + -ling (diminutive suffix), although dumpling is recorded much earlier. However, compare…

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 3.0