Gadlings

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Referring to a group of travelers or wanderers typically moving about without a fixed destination; describing individuals who move restlessly or aimlessly around a place; characterizing a collection of people roaming or drifting from one location to another
2. Denoting a band of wayfarers moving without permanent settlement; indicating persons who are unsettled and frequently changing their whereabouts; portraying a cluster of nomads or rovers journeying from place to place
3. Signifying a set of itinerants who travel about with no set home; representing individuals who roam or drift irregularly; illustrating a group of people moving about in a roving or unanchored manner

Etymology: "Gadlings" is the plural of "gadling," and the noun has travelled a long way from its origins. In Old English, a "geaduling" or "gædeling" was a kinsman, a companion, or a comrade in arms, someone bound to you by blood or fellowship. The root behind it is the same family as "ġegada," an Old English word for a companion, which points back to a Proto-Germanic idea of relatives who belonged together. Over the Middle English period the meaning slid downward. The word came to describe a fellow or a man of low birth, then a rascal or scoundrel, and eventually a bastard or lowborn person. A "gadeling" in Middle English could also be a vagabond, a wanderer without a settled home, and it is this sense of rootlessness that survives in the plural "gadlings," used for roving people groups. The loyal companion of the old warband had become the unsettled outsider of the roads.