Landlouper

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A vagabond or wandering person who has no fixed home and roams from place to place
2. An itinerant drifter, especially one living without a settled residence or occupation, who moves about the countryside
3. Someone who roams the land without any permanent abode, a rover or tramp in archaic usage

Etymology: "Landlouper" came into English from Dutch "landloper," which literally means "land-runner," a compound of "land" (land, ground) and "loper" (one who runs or walks). The Dutch sense was of a wanderer who roams the countryside without a settled home, and English adopted the term in that sense for a vagrant or drifter. English already had a near-twin of its own. "Landleaper" was formed from "land" and "leaper," meaning one who leaps across the land, and the two forms merged, so the borrowed Dutch word and the native English one came to share a single meaning. The result is a word that owes its shape to a Dutch compound while sitting alongside an English one built from the same building blocks.

Synonyms: vagrant, vagabond, tramp, wanderer

Antonyms: resident, settler