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traipse

UK/tɹeɪps/US/tɹeɪps/
verbC1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechmostly spokeninformal · an editor’s judgement

Other forms: traipsing

To traipse is to trudge about wearily and with little to show for it. Four shops, still no shoes that fit.

The complaint is built into the word. Nobody traipses anywhere happily: you traipse round town, traipse up and down stairs, traipse halfway across the city for a meeting that could have been an email. It nearly always takes a preposition and a sense of wasted distance. Walk is neutral, trudge is heavy, and traipse is the one that adds pointlessness to the effort — which is why it turns up so often with all the way.

Definitions of traipse

  1. 1verbtraipseTo walk about tiredly and with little result.C1

    “We traipsed round four shops looking for a plug.”

    synonyms: trudge, trek

Where it comes from

  1. French

    trépasser — pass over or beyond

  2. English, today

    traipse

Likely from French trépasser (“pass over or beyond”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 25 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

traipse in the wild

  • Similarly, to traipse or to mince is to walk in some manner".

    Troponymy

  • According to critic Mark Andrew: Old dude and his sexy niece traipse across the countryside, bumping into oddball characters who invariably have a story to tell....

    Midnight Tales

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.