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wander

UK/ˈwɒndə/US/ˈwɑndɚ/
verbB24 meaningsCommon in everyday speech and writing · #3,396 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: wandering, wanders, wandered

To wander is to walk with no route in mind, going wherever your feet take you. An hour spent wandering round a strange town, stopping at a window, turning down a side street because it looked nicer.

Your mind wanders as well — you have read the same paragraph three times and none of it went in. Children wander off in supermarkets; sheep wander onto the road. In British English you can take a wander: 'I had a wander round the shops.' A wanderer is someone who never settles anywhere for long. Watch the spelling and the sound: wander rhymes with ponder and means walking, wonder rhymes with thunder and means asking yourself something — swapping the two is the commonest mistake with this word.

Definitions of wander

  1. 1verbwanderTo walk slowly with no fixed route or purpose.B2

    “They wandered through the old town until it got dark.”

    synonyms: roam, ramble, stroll

  2. 2verbmindOf the mind or attention: to drift away from what you are supposed to be thinking about.B2

    “His attention wandered halfway through the meeting.”

  3. 3verbmoveTo move away from where you are meant to be.B2

    “The toddler wandered off while she was paying.”

  4. 4nountakenA slow walk taken for pleasure.B2

    “We went for a wander along the river after lunch.”

Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.

Also accepted in games: roam

Where it comes from

Wander is Old English wandrian, glossed as to wander, roam, hover, stray and err, and it has barely shifted in a thousand years. Its cousins are still walking all over northern Europe: German wandern, to hike, Dutch wandelen, Danish vandre, Swedish vandra. The Old English sense already covered going wrong as well as going nowhere, which is the shade the word keeps when a mind wanders.

  1. Proto-West Germanic

    *wandarōn — to wander

  2. Old English

    wandrian — to wander, roam, fly around, hover; change; stray, err

  3. Middle English

    wandren

  4. English, today

    wander

From Middle English wandren, from Old English wandrian (“to wander, roam, fly around, hover; change; stray, err”), from Proto-West Germanic wandarōn (“to wander”), from wandōn + -rōn. Cognate with Scots wander (“to wander”), German wandern (“to wander, roam, hike, migrate”), Dutch wandelen (“to wander, roam, hike, migrate”), Danish vandre (“to wander, roam, hike, migrate”), Swedish vandra (“to wander, hike”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Everyday Verbs, A Man Called Ove, Ways of Moving

First appears in chapter 4 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

wander in the wild

  • However, in what is known as true polar wander, the Earth rotates with respect to a fixed spin axis.

    Cataclysmic pole shift hypothesis

  • Some years later, she was again sent away by her mistress with her child Ishmael to wander in the wilderness.

    Hagar International

  • The Arboretum's garden paths wander through four major collections: Cultivated, Woodlands, Mediterranean and Desert Collections.

    Fullerton Arboretum

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.

Related words

  • wanderlust