Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. One who is absent without permission, especially from school.
- n. One who shirks work or duty.
- adj. Absent without permission, especially from school.
- adj. Idle, lazy, or neglectful.
- v. To be truant.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A vagabond; a vagrant; an idler.
- Idle; loitering; given to shirking duty or business, or attendance at some appointed time or place: especially noting children who absent themselves from school without leave.
- Characteristic of a truant; idle; loitering; wandering.
- To idle away time or shirk duty; play truant.
- To waste or idle away.
Wiktionary
- adj. Describing one who is truant, absent without permission, especially from school.
- n. One who is absent without permission, especially from school.
- v. intransitive To play truant.
- v. transitive To idle away; to waste.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. One who stays away from business or any duty; especially, one who stays out of school without leave; an idler; a loiterer; a shirk.
- adj. Wandering from business or duty; loitering; idle, and shirking duty.
- v. To idle away time; to loiter, or wander; to play the truant.
- v. rare To idle away; to waste.
WordNet 3.0
- n. someone who shirks duty
- adj. absent without permission
- n. one who is absent from school without permission
Etymologies
- From Middle English truant, truand, trewande, trowant (= Middle Dutch trouwant, trawant, truwant), from Old French truand, truant ("a vagabond, beggar, rogue", also "beggarly, roguish"), of Celtic origin, perhaps from Gaulish *trugan, or from Breton truan. Cognate with Scottish Gaelic truaghan, Irish trogha ("destitute"), trogán, Breton truc ("beggar"), Welsh tru. (Wiktionary)
- Middle English, beggar, from Old French. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“I called the truant officer, and now the kids' school is supplying them with food and cell phones.”
The Huffington Post: Kristin Wilson Keppler: What Children Can Learn From Egypt
“The girls hurried out before the employees had a chance to call the truant officer and ran down the street.”
Fictionaut: Arcana Magi Zero - v.3: It's So Wonderful, It's So Beautiful
“But still his heart failed; for he could not recall his truant thoughts from the wolf-like”
Little Folks A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown)
“It'll be many a day I shall be called truant, I reckon.”
Little Folks A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown)
“The truant was a pretty, white-nosed creature, a special pet of his master's, with great brown, confiding eyes, and ample ears, and Amberley had named him Simon.”
“Then the Kentish king, admonished by a dream of the archbishop's, made submission, recalled the truant bishops, and restored Justus to”
“Before the pleasant afternoon closed, he had gained permission to call the truant Letty, and she primmed her rosy lips as he taught her to say Will.”
The Chequers Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in a Loafer's Diary
“It goes, however, slower and slower, and curving its journey less and less, until at last its motion in remote obscurity is again so sluggish, that the sun's attraction is once more predominant, and able to recall the truant towards its realms of light.”
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852
“Roman Catholic schoolgirl labelled 'truant' for refusing to wear headscarf on mosque trip”
Telegraph.co.uk - Telegraph online, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph
“A Roman Catholic schoolgirl has been labelled a truant after she refused to wear a headscarf during a compulsory trip to a mosque.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘truant’.
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Test Prep or Just for fun
Building a list for standardized test prep or just for learning some new words! Please add any words that you feel are important for the SAT/GRE/GMAT etc...
throng, morass, parley, facile, kismet, strife, jetsam, carrion, annex, harbinger, vestige, surreptitious and 575 more...
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Dramatic Nouns
Nouns to be used as descriptions while writing stories
night owl, early bird, hedonist, ascetic, derelict, explorer, radical, pity friend, cupid, truant, caretaker, guardian and 120 more...
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UK Usage - Find US Equivalent
All these terms have a (different) American English equivalent. Wonder if you can identify them?
abridgement (abri..., accoutrement, accoutre, acknowledgement (..., opposite, advert, adaptor, adapter, sticking plaster, advertise, adviser (advisor ..., adze, aesthete and 1196 more...
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Living outside the status quo
cardsharp, grifter, heist, heroine, mercenary, rapscallion, rogue, truant, renegade, outlaw, rebel, sedition and 4 more...
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Whether 'Tis Nobler: Words From Hamlet
nay, 'tis, thee, haste, ho, liegemen, o, hath, holla, entreated, apparition, tush and 104 more...
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Chennessy's Words
philistine, messianic, dyad, cult, bourgeois, blot, ploy, polyglot, lingua franca, cumbersome, lumber, petit-bourgeois and 446 more...
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Vocab
Words that I come across, and go blank, or want to clarify.
nefarious, edifice, malevolent, ostensible, folderol, bauble, livid, amnesty, calculus, saddlery, maisonette, cuisse and 423 more...
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Wordwild's Delights
Delightful words to read and use
plangent, ribald, titubant, sidereal, pelagic, improvident, dolorous, parlous, baleful, precatory, pied, mephitic and 247 more...
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lanklenmot's Words
ineluctable, prelapsarian, bien pensant, prospero, preternatural, gratifying, iconoclast, cineast, persnickety, tumescent, galvanize, pap and 887 more...
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stpeter's Words
abase, abasement, abashed, abdicate, aberrant, abeyance, abhor, abhorrent, abide, abject, ablation, abnegation and 3536 more...
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Reading Random
Got unknown words randomly
delinquency, modicum, dissuade, incendiary, destitute, lachrymose, plight, ruse, empirical, pedantic, demography, giggle and 444 more...
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Words!
expiate, litote, quixotic, expectorant, brakish, animadversion, militated, garish, rrulous, desiderate, desiderata, desideratum and 131 more...
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supplementary
for enhancement of any English test
consanguineous, worldly, naiveté, enshroud, pernicious, prerogative, traitor, fledgling, vengeance, provision, furnish, quarrel and 94 more...
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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Murakam...
found while reading
frontispiece, expedient, dapple, sheaf, downy, rivet, curriculum vitae, furtive, austerity, rebuke, prognostication, pedigree and 99 more...
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5-0
Hecko, words! I’m so happy I’ve found you. I want to keep you all and never want to lose you again. I hope you like it here.
amscray, thistledown, tine, tinsel, pungent, snarl, wail, lanky, viscid, dawdle, luminous, stow and 2719 more...
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Vocab List 2
bruit, smite, malapropism, tricorn, tenebrous, mawkish, disjunctive, mammon, lothario, embonpoint, pabulum, pother and 148 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for truant.
rolig I love the older sense of truant, as "stray, displaced, wandering", used by George Eliot in this passage from The Mill on the Floss, describing the Red Deeps, an area of hollows and hills where Maggie Tulliver enjoyed taking her walks. The place, she says, had a charm for Maggie:
especially in summer, when she could sit in the grassy hollow under the shadow of a branching ash, stooping aslant from the steep above her, and listen to the hum of insects, like tiniest bells on the garment of Silence, or see the sunlight piercing the distant boughs, as if to chase and drive home the truant heavenly blue of the wild hyacinths.
— George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860), Book V, chap. 1, "In the Red Deeps"
Dec 31, 2012