Other forms: vagrants
A vagrant is somebody with no home who moves from place to place. A legal word before it was a human one.
English law once made vagrancy a criminal offence, and the Vagrancy Act of 1824 was still being used against rough sleepers in the twenty-first century, which is why the word carries so much weight. Modern writing prefers homeless person or rough sleeper, both of which describe a situation rather than a character. There is a neutral use in ornithology, where a vagrant is a bird that has strayed far outside its normal range.
Vagrant is two wanderings crossed. The Old French form walcrant came from a Frankish verb meaning to wander about, and Latin vagārī, to roam, pulled the spelling across to the v it wears now.
Proto-Indo-European
*welH-
Proto-Indo-European
*walg-
Proto-Germanic
*walkōną — to roll about, wallow; to full
Frankish
*walkrōn — to wander about
Latin
vagārī
Old French
walcrant
Anglo-Norman
vagarant
Middle English
vagraunt — person without proper employment; person without a fixed abode, tramp, vagabond
English, today
vagrant
Built from
From Late Middle English vagraunt (“person without proper employment; person without a fixed abode, tramp, vagabond”)vagaraunt, vagaraunte, vageraunt, probably from Anglo-Norman vagarant, wakerant, waucrant (“vagrant”)wacrant, walcrant and Old French walcrant, waucrant (“roaming, wandering”)wacrant, perhaps influenced by Latin vagārī, the present active infinitive of vagor (“to ramble, stroll about; to roam, rove, wander”). Old French walcrant is the present participle of vagrer, wacrer, walcrer (“to wander, wander about as a vagabond”)waucrer, from Frankish walkrōn (“to wander about”), the frequentative form of walkōn (“to walk; to wander; to stomp, trample; to full (make cloth denser and firmer by soaking, beating and pressing)”), from Proto-Germanic walkōną (“to roll about, wallow; to full”), walkaną (“to turn, wind; to toss; to roll, roll about; to wend; to walk; to wander; to trample; to full”), from Proto-Indo-European walg-, walk-, welgʰ-, welk-, wolg- (“to turn, twist; to move”), ultimately from welH- (“to turn; to wind”). The English word is cognate with Latin valgus (“bandy-legged, bow-legged”), Middle Dutch walken (“to knead; to full”), Old English wealcan (“to roll”), ġewealcan (“to go; to walk about”), Old High German walchan, walkan (“to move up and down; to press together; to full; to walk; to wander”), Old Norse valka (“to wander”). See further at walk.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA