Word of the Day

: March 5, 2008

errant

adjective AIR-unt

What It Means

1 : traveling or given to traveling

2 a : straying outside the proper path or bounds

b : moving about aimlessly or irregularly

c : behaving wrongly

errant in Context

"'Move! Move! Move!' cried Helen, chasing him from corner to corner with a chair as though he were an errant hen." (Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, 1915)

Did You Know?

"Errant" has a split history. It comes from Anglo-French, a language in which two confusingly similar verbs with identical spellings ("errer") coexisted. One "errer" meant "to err" and comes from the Latin "errare," meaning "to wander" or "to err." The second "errer" meant "to travel," and traces to the Latin "iter," meaning "road" or "journey." Both "errer" homographs contributed to the development of "errant," which not surprisingly has to do with both moving about and being mistaken. A "knight-errant" travels around in search of adventures. Cowboys round up "errant calves." An "errant child" is one who misbehaves. (You might also see "arrant" occasionally -- it's a word that originated as an alteration of "errant" and that usually means "extreme" or "shameless.")