Truant

/ˈtɹuːənt/ · adjective

Meaning

Shirking or wandering from business or duty; straying; hence, idle; loitering..

Definitions by Sense

1. Shirking or wandering from business or duty; straying; hence, idle; loitering.
2. (specifically) Of a student: absent from school without permission.
3. (obsolete) Having no real substance; unimportant, vain, worthless.
4. An idle or lazy person; an idler.
5. (specifically) A student who is absent from school without permission; hence (figurative), a person who shirks or wanders from business or duty.
6. (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.
7. (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.
8. (transitive, obsolete) To idle away or waste (time).

Example Sentences

Ham[let]. And vvhat in faith make you from VVittenberg? / Hora[tio]. A truant diſpoſition good my Lord.

[W]ee are not to imitate them; nor to diſtruſt God in the removal of that Truant help to our Devotion, vvhich by him never vvas appointed.

But vvhere thou ſeeſt a ſingle Sheep remain / In ſhades aloof, or couch'd upon the Plain; / Or liſtleſly to crop the tender Graſs; / Or late to lag behind, vvith truant pace; / Revenge the Crime; and take the Traytor's head, / E're in the faultleſs Flock the dire Contagion ſpread.

In elder days, in Saturn's prime, / Ere baldness seized the head of Time, / While truant Jove, in infant pride, / Play'd barefoot on Olympus' side, / Each thing on earth had power to chatter, / And spoke the mother tongue of nature.

[I] have loved the rural vvalk / O'er hills, through valleys, and by rivers brink, / E'er ſince a truant boy I paſs'd my bounds / T'enjoy a ramble on the banks of Thames.

Dovvn the ſteep ſlopes He led vvith modeſt ſkill / The vvilling pathvvay, and the truant rill, […]

Me, lured by hope its sorrows to remove, / A heart that could not much itself approve / O'er Gallia's wastes of corn dejected led, / Her road elms rustling high above my head, / Or through her truant pathways' native charms, / By secret villages and lonely farms, […]

Indeed, calamity is welcome to women if they think it will bring truant affection home again: and if you have reduced your mistress to a crust, depend upon it that she won't repine, and only take a very little bit of it for herself, provided you will eat the remainder in her company.

Synonyms for truant

Antonyms for truant

Related Words

Word Forms

• truants
• truanting
• truanted

Usage Notes

Choose a synonym only when it preserves the intended meaning, tone, and grammar of the full sentence.

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