Other forms: truants
A truant is a pupil secretly skipping school for the day. Play truant, a persistent truant, truant officer.
Playing truant is the British phrase and playing hooky the American one. Attendance is enforced on the parent in England, who can be fined, which makes truancy a legal matter as well as a school one. Note that the word once meant a vagrant or beggar, which is a much older and broader sense.
1nountruantA pupil secretly skipping school.
“The police found the truants playing video games in the shopping centre during school hours.”
truant is an absentee.
Middle English truant meant a vagrant or beggar, from Old French. The schoolroom sense is a narrowing.
Proto-Indo-European
*terh₁-
Proto-Indo-European
*térh₁-tro-m
Proto-Celtic
*taratrom
Breton
truan — wretched
cel-gau
*trugan
Old French
truant
Middle English
truant
English, today
truant
Built from
The adjective and noun are derived from Middle English truant, truand, truaund (“(adjective) idle; tending to vagrancy (uncertain; may be a use of the noun); (noun) beggar; mendicant friar; vagrant, wanderer; worthless person, rogue, scoundrel; one who is absent without leave, truant; one who shirks duties”), from Old French truant, truand (“(adjective) beggarly; roguish; (noun) a beggar, vagabond; a rogue”) (modern French truand), probably of cel - origin, possibly from cel-gau trugan, or from Breton truan (“wretched”), from Proto-Celtic taratrom, from Proto-Indo-European térh₁-tro-m, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European terh₁- (“to drill, pierce; to rub; to turn”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA