Erraunt

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Roaming from place to place without a fixed course ; departing from accepted conduct or moral standards
2. Moving about aimlessly with no settled home ; deviating from what is proper, correct, or morally upright
3. Wandering through the world without a set path ; having gone astray from virtue, duty, or the usual way of behaving

Etymology: Before it described knights and sinners, "errant" simply meant "wandering," and its roots run back to the idea of flowing. The Latin verb "errare" meant to rove or stray, and its present participle "errans" gave French "errant," which English borrowed in Middle English as "erraunt," the form you have here. Its Proto-Indo-European root is traced to a word meaning "to flow," so the notion of drifting has been built into it from the start. The sense of straying also carried a moral edge. Latin "errare" could mean to err in the sense of going wrong, and English kept both uses alive, so a wanderer and a sinner were once close kin in the same word. "Errant" is also a doublet of "arrant," the two forms descending from the same source by separate routes into English.

Synonyms: errant, wandering, roving

Antonyms: settled, stationary