truant
UK /ˈtɹuːənt/ · US /ˈtɹuənt/ adjective, noun, verb
Forms truants truanting truanted
- adjective Shirking or wandering from business or duty; straying; hence, idle; loitering.
- adjective (specifically) Of a student: absent from school without permission. “He didn’t graduate because he was chronically truant and didn’t have enough attendances to meet the requirement.”
- adjective (obsolete) Having no real substance; unimportant, vain, worthless.
- noun An idle or lazy person; an idler.
- noun (specifically) A student who is absent from school without permission; hence (figurative), a person who shirks or wanders from business or duty.
- noun (obsolete) Synonym of sturdy beggar (“a person who was fit and able to work, but lived as a beggar or vagrant instead”); hence, a worthless person; a rogue, a scoundrel.
- verb (intransitive) Also used with the impersonal pronoun it (dated): to shirk or wander from business or duty; (specifically) of a student: to be absent from school without permission; to play truant. “The number of schoolchildren known to have truanted from this school has been unusually high.”
- verb (transitive, obsolete) To idle away or waste (time).
Synonyms
bum couch potato dawdler deadbeat dogfucker do-naught do-nothing dosser idler idleton faineant flaneur footler get-nothing good-for-nothing goldbricker goof-off lallygag lollygagger laggard hooky player no-show nonattender awol
Etymology
The adjective and noun are derived from Middle English truant, truand, truaund (“(adjective) idle; tending to vagrancy (uncertain; may be a use of the noun); (noun) beggar; mendicant friar; vagrant, wanderer; worthless person, rogue, scoundrel; one who is absent without leave, truant; one who shirks duties”), from Old French truant, truand (“(adjective) beggarly; roguish; (noun) a beggar, vagabond; a rogue”) (modern French truand), probably of Celtic origin, possibly from Gaulish *trugan, or from Breton truan (“wretched”), from Proto-Celtic *taratrom, from Proto-Indo-European *térh₁-tro-m, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *terh₁- (“to drill, pierce; to rub; to turn”).
* Breton truc (“beggar”)
* Irish trogán, trogha (“destitute”)
* Middle Dutch trawant, trouwant, truwant
* Scottish Gaelic trudanach (“vagabond”), truaghan (“wretched”)
* Welsh tru, truan (“wretched”)
Inherited from Middle English truaunten (“to obtain alms fraudulently; to behave like a rogue or scoundrel; to neglect a duty; to be idle or lazy”), and then partly:
* from Old French truander (modern French truander (“to cheat, to con”)), from truand (noun) (see etymology 1) + -er (suffix forming infinitives of first-conjugation verbs); and
* from Middle English truaunt (noun) (see etymology 1) + -en (suffix forming infinitives of verbs).
Webster’s 1913
- noun One who stays away from business or any duty; especially, one who stays out of school without leave; an idler; a loiterer; a shirk.
- adjective Wandering from business or duty; loitering; idle, and shirking duty; as, a truant boy. While truant Jove, in infant pride, Played barefoot on Olympus' side.
- verb To idle away time; to loiter, or wander; to play the truant.
- verb To idle away; to waste. [R.]
Etymology [F. truand, OF. truant, a vagrant, beggar; of Celtic origin; cf. W. tru, truan, wretched, miserable, truan a wretch, Ir. trogha miserable, Gael. truaghan a poor, distressed, or wretched creature, truagh wretched.]
Etymology [Cf. F. truander.]
Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “truant”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details