Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The state, condition, or habits of a vagabond; idle wandering, with or without fraudulent intent: as, to live in vagabondage.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The condition of a vagabond; a state or habit of wandering about in idleness; vagrancy.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The state or characteristic of being a vagabond.
  • noun Vagabonds, considered as a collective.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun travelling about without any clear destination

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Borrowing from French vagabondage

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word vagabondage.

Examples

  • "On the doss," they call vagabondage here, which corresponds to "on the road" in the United States.

    The People of the Abyss Jack London 1896

  • In its simplest form the temper of adventure has given us the profusion of pleasant verses which we know as the poetry of 'vagabondage' and 'the open road'.

    Recent Developments in European Thought Various

  • Shelley himself can no more bring themselves to commit adultery than to commit any common theft, whilst women who loathe sex slavery more fiercely than Mary Wollstonecraft are unable to face the insecurity and discredit of the vagabondage which is the masterless woman's only alternative to celibacy.

    Getting Married George Bernard Shaw 1903

  • Many would nominate "Ironweed" (1983), that lyrical and redemptive novel about the Odyssean homecoming of Francis Phelan after 20 years of alcoholic vagabondage, a book that touched the zeitgeist (and won a Pulitzer) at a time of intense concern about homelessness.

    Corruption on the Hudson Sam Sacks 2011

  • In the house, he comes across the diaries of Mary Todd Lincoln, who after her husband's assassination was slowly reduced to vagabondage and near poverty.

    Deathless Accounts Of Mourning Adam Haslett 2011

  • "On the doss," they call vagabondage here, which corresponds to "on the road" in the United States.

    THE SPIKE 2010

  • A confessed failure, he yet refuses to accept the punishment, and swerves aside from the slum to vagabondage.

    THE TRAMP 2010

  • Brown has carried on the family tradition of vagabondage in her adult life, living in places as distinct as the Deep South and New England, developing the acute awareness outsiders must possess in order to survive, and an obsession with the spirit of place, a clarifying focus that informs her entire oeuvre.

    Brown, Rosellen. 2009

  • All crimes of the man begin in the vagabondage of the child.

    Les Miserables 2008

  • The reader must permit us to interrupt ourselves here and to remind him that we are dealing with simple reality, and that twenty years ago, the tribunals were called upon to judge, under the charge of vagabondage, and mutilation of a public monument, a child who had been caught asleep in this very elephant of the Bastille.

    Les Miserables 2008

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • another good word. am compelled to steal,

    June 15, 2007

  • "He set them in localities where the struggle could be most obvious: in the wilds of Alaska, on remote Pacific Islands, on ships at sea out of strikes, in the underworlds of various during strikes, in the underworlds of various cities, on the routes of vagabondage."

    - Carl Van Doren, 'The American Novel'.

    September 20, 2009