vagrantize

English

Alternative forms

• vagrantise

Etymology

vagrant +‎ -ize

Verb

vagrantize (third-person singular simple present vagrantizes, present participle vagrantizing, simple past and past participle vagrantized)

1. To wander freely, with no goal.
   • 1852, Lewis William Mansfield, edited by William B. Benedict, Up-country Letters, page 126:

     I say, in spite of this, my coming home is always coming to such a welcome, that I vow, always, never to vagrantize from that day forth again.

   • 1859, Nathaniel Parker Willis, The Convalescent, page 85:

     The ladies and children were about taking leave of him— his long stick in hand and his face turned towards the mountains where he is to vagrantize for the summer—when it occurred to him to turn and inquire, whether, in that closely-tied and yet unexamined bundle, there happened to be a coat.

   • 2017, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, The Linwoods - Or, "Sixty Years Since" in America in Two Volumes - Volume 1:

     On the 10th he had been out on the other side of the river, vagrantizing in his usual fashion, and returning late to his little boat, and, as we suspect, having fallen asleep, he drifted ashore at Stony Point.

2. To turn into a vagrant; to deprive of a home.
   • 1797, Mrs. Agnes Maria Bennett, The Beggar Girl and Her Benefactors - Volume 1, page 33:

     though the proud Cleopatra herself condescended to sue for one night's possession of the barn, old John took a couple of labourers with him, and while his wife was trimming the suppliant queen in her way, he demolished ' the cloud-capt towers and gorgeous palaces,' and turning the whole moveables into the yard, locked the door, and set off to the next justice of the peace, for the purpose of getting the whole set vagrantized.

   • 1991, Leslie Ann Pahl, Margins of Modernity, page 18:

     But the criminal status of other groups was vague; criminals were initially vagrantized bandit groups that then became more and more marginalized as more effective policing” made banditry difficult, if not impossible.

   • 1999, Tom Bradley, Black Class Cur, page 232:

     Immobilized, unable to drag himself out to the fort, Bu Yu had been vagrantized, or so he'd thought, on a permanent basis.