va·grant

(vā′grənt)

a. One who wanders from place to place without a permanent home or a means of livelihood.

b. Archaic A wanderer; a rover.

2. One who lives on the streets or constitutes a public nuisance.

3. An animal occurring beyond its normal range; an accidental.

adj.

1. Wandering from place to place and lacking any means of support.

2. Living on the streets or constituting a public nuisance.

3. Inconstant or capricious; wayward: "She was resolved to win my vagrant fancy" (Frank Harris).

4. Moving in a random fashion; having no fixed direction or pattern: vagrant ice floes; a vagrant aroma.

5. Being beyond its normal range; accidental. Used of animals.

[Middle English vagraunt, probably alteration of Old French wacrant, present participle of wacrer, to wander, of Germanic origin.]

va′grant·ly adv.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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vagrant

References in periodicals archive

The men and women were allotted to different proprietors of estates to work in the expanding coconut and vanilla industries, whilst the children lived vagrantly or were employed in households.

Seychelles a history of slavery: once upon a time the shores of the Seychelles offered shelter to hundreds of liberated African slaves. Tony Mathiot recently visited one such spot, the "Mission Ruins", the sanctuary where the children of freed African slaves stayed

It could not be a planet vagrantly adrift from the ecliptic, nor could it be a comet dashing through the sky.

Observing the occasion

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