View synonyms for adrift

adrift

[ uh-drift ]

Phonetic (Standard)IPA

adjective

floating without control; drifting; not anchored or moored:
The survivors were adrift in the rowboat for three days.
lacking aim, direction, or stability.

adrift

/ əˈdrɪft /

Origin of adrift¹

First recorded in 1615–25; a- ¹ + drift

Once we were discussing Lifeboat, a Hitchcock film that takes place almost entirely in a small boat adrift at sea.

Adrift in senility and depression, Hitchcock is dismantling his life, putting it away.

Still, “They were my island of misfit toys,” she says, adrift.

The reason Price of Fame ultimately becomes tiresome is our increasing awareness of how adrift the woman at its center is.

Each experience—like so many others in her life—left her wounded, weary, adrift.

If we set him adrift the poor child would starve—unless the cat got him.

They encountered a score of ruffians who had cut themselves adrift from the Gwalior contingent.

Joe was out on the boom, getting the reef-earrings adrift, when the first of the chapter of accidents came.

The boats no longer looked as if cutting their way through the lands, but adrift on a great lake.

He had made and set adrift those powder kegs, fixing them so that they would explode on touching anything.

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