Other forms: drifting, drifted, drifts
To drift is to be carried along by water or air with nothing steering you. A boat with the engine off drifts down the river, smoke drifts across the garden, a plastic bottle drifts out on the tide.
The word moved easily into human life: people drift into a job they never chose, friends drift apart across ten years, a lesson drifts off the point. As a noun it is a mass of something piled up by the wind — snow drifts as deep as the gate — and also the general sense of what a person is saying: I missed a few words, but I got his drift. Continental drift is the slow sliding of the plates that carry the continents. The thread through all of it is the missing driver; if a thing drifts, nobody has hold of the wheel.
1verbdriftTo be carried along by a current of water or air.
“The raft drifted slowly towards the far bank.”
synonyms: float
2verbmoveTo move or change gradually, with no plan or decision behind it.
“He drifted from one temporary job to the next.”
3nounheapA heap of snow or sand piled up by the wind.
“The lane was blocked by a drift two metres deep.”
4noungeneralThe general meaning of what someone is saying.
“I missed some of it, but I caught her drift.”
Drift is the noun of drive: Old English drift, from Proto-Germanic *driftiz, built on the root behind drive, Proto-Indo-European *dhreybh-, 'to drive, push'. It named whatever was driven along — a drove of animals, a fall of snow, a push of rain. The Scandinavian cousins turned the meaning inwards, so Danish and Swedish drift is an urge or an instinct: the thing that drives you.
Proto-Indo-European
*dʰreybʰ- — to drive, push
Proto-Germanic
*driftiz — drift
Old English
*drift — drift
Middle English
drift
English, today
drift
Built from
From Middle English drift, dryft (“act of driving, drove, shower of rain or snow, impulse”), from Old English drift (“drift”), from Proto-Germanic driftiz (“drift”), from Proto-Indo-European dʰreybʰ- (“to drive, push”). Equivalent to drive + t; cognate with frr drift (“drift”), stq Drift (“current, flow, stream, drift”), Dutch drift (“drift, passion, urge”), German Drift (“drift”) and Trift (“drove, pasture”), Danish drift (“impulse, instinct”), Swedish drift (“impulse, instinct”), Icelandic drift (“drift, snow-drift”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA