VAGRANT

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

IPA (US):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does vagrant mean? 

• VAGRANT (noun)
  The noun VAGRANT has 1 sense:

1. a wanderer who has no established residence or visible means of support

  Familiarity information: VAGRANT used as a noun is very rare.

• VAGRANT (adjective)
  The adjective VAGRANT has 1 sense:

1. continually changing especially as from one abode or occupation to another

  Familiarity information: VAGRANT used as an adjective is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• VAGRANT (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A wanderer who has no established residence or visible means of support

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Synonyms:

clochard; drifter; floater; vagabond; vagrant

Hypernyms ("vagrant" is a kind of...):

have-not; poor person (a person with few or no possessions)

bird of passage; roamer; rover; wanderer (someone who leads a wandering unsettled life)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "vagrant"):

beachcomber (a vagrant living on a beach)

sundowner (a tramp who habitually arrives at sundown)

bum; hobo; tramp (a vagrant)

Derivation:

vagrant (continually changing especially as from one abode or occupation to another)

• VAGRANT (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Continually changing especially as from one abode or occupation to another

Synonyms:

aimless; drifting; floating; vagabond; vagrant

Context example:

vagrant hippies of the sixties

Similar:

unsettled (not settled or established)

Derivation:

vagrancy (the state of wandering from place to place; having no permanent home or means of livelihood)

vagrant (a wanderer who has no established residence or visible means of support)

 Context examples 

"I'll give you a piece of bread," she said, after a pause; "but we can't take in a vagrant to lodge. It isn't likely."

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

The four others were dark-eyed, hardy little vagrants; this child was thin and very fair.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

And then, where a vagrant shaft of sunlight struck the ocean and turned its surface to wrathful silver, I caught a small black speck thrust skyward for an instant and swallowed up.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

She smiled to herself at vagrant impulses which arose from nowhere and suggested that she rumple his hair; while he desired greatly, when they tired of reading, to rest his head in her lap and dream with closed eyes about the future that was to be theirs.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

Now Irvine was a man of impulse, a poet. He got off the train at the next station, bought a piece of meat at a butcher shop, and captured the vagrant on the outskirts of the town.

(Love of Life and Other Stories, by Jack London)

Not to lengthen these particulars, I need only add, that she made a handsome provision for all my possible wants during my month of trial; that Steerforth, to my great disappointment and hers too, did not make his appearance before she went away; that I saw her safely seated in the Dover coach, exulting in the coming discomfiture of the vagrant donkeys, with Janet at her side; and that when the coach was gone, I turned my face to the Adelphi, pondering on the old days when I used to roam about its subterranean arches, and on the happy changes which had brought me to the surface.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

“You hardly realize, sir, that I am not a man, or that I am unaccustomed to the vagrant, careless life which you and your men seem to lead.”

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

Somehow, now that I had once crossed the threshold of this house, and once was brought face to face with its owners, I felt no longer outcast, vagrant, and disowned by the wide world.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Then, too, she loved nature, and with generous imagination he changed the scene of their reading—sometimes they read in closed-in valleys with precipitous walls, or in high mountain meadows, and, again, down by the gray sand-dunes with a wreath of billows at their feet, or afar on some volcanic tropic isle where waterfalls descended and became mist, reaching the sea in vapor veils that swayed and shivered to every vagrant wisp of wind.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

From the point the shore curved away, more and more to the south and west, until at last it disclosed a cove within the cove, a little land-locked harbour, the water level as a pond, broken only by tiny ripples where vagrant breaths and wisps of the storm hurtled down from over the frowning wall of rock that backed the beach a hundred feet inshore.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)