Truant

Quick meaning: Truant is an adjective meaning Shirking or wandering from business or duty; straying; hence, idle; loitering.

Meaning

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

More Meanings

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

Example Sentences

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

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.

[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.

Word Forms

• truants
• truanting
• truanted

Synonyms for truant

Depending on context, synonyms include dawdler, deadbeat, dogfucker, do-naught, do-nothing, dosser.

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include awol, absent, no-show, nonattender, idle, chronically.

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