truant
Meanings
- Shirking or wandering from business or duty; straying; hence, idle; loitering.
- Of a student: absent from school without permission.
- Having no real substance; unimportant, vain, worthless.
- An idle or lazy person; an idler.
- A student who is absent from school without permission; hence (figurative), a person who shirks or wanders from business or duty.
- 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.
- 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.
- To idle away or waste (time).
Pronunciation
Word forms
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 *térh₁-tro-m, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *terh₁- (“to drill, pierce; to rub; to turn”). Cognates * Breton truc (“beggar”) * Irish trogán, trogha (“destitute”) * Middle Dutch trawant, trouwant, truwant * Occitan truan * Portuguese truão * Scottish Gaelic trudanach (“vagabond”), truaghan (“wretched”) * Spanish truhan * Welsh tru, truan (“wretched”)