noun
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a person or thing that drifts
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a person who moves aimlessly from place to place, usually without a regular job
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a boat used for drift-net fishing
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nautical a large jib of thin material used in light breezes
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of drifter
Explanation
An aimless wanderer, someone without a permanent home, is a drifter. Your distant cousin who parks his camper in your driveway for a few weeks and then moves on? You can call him a drifter. The original meaning of drifter was a miner whose job was excavating horizontal tunnels, which were known as drifts. Starting around 1880, it was also used for a type of fishing boat that used drift nets. For most of the 20th century, however, the most common use of drifter was to describe a vagrant, homeless person, or someone whose lifestyle involved drifting from place to place.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
A swaggering drifter named Hal Carter arrives in town looking for work, and by sunset he has thrown the community, especially the fragile Madge Owens, into emotional turmoil.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 2, 2026
A drifter, he lived in Portugal's Algarve region, on and off, for years.
From BBC ● May 9, 2025
It might have helped if Siff had a sturdier partner, but Alexander’s wan emo sensibility lacks the haunted charisma of a sexy drifter attempting to move on from his past.
From New York Times ● Jul. 18, 2023
He plays the laborer and the free-spirited drifter who would never succumb to the burdens of economic hardship.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 26, 2023
Or it could be a drifter who had come through town and they’d buried him where he’d dropped dead.
From "Moon Over Manifest" by Clare Vanderpool
In “Moby-Dick,” Herman Melville describes Nantucket as an “ant hill in the sea,” an isolated outpost for whalers and drifters.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 20, 2026
Juliette Lewis has played murderers, drifters, alcoholics, punk rockers, Reiki healers and roller-derby captains.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 23, 2025
Kristofferson turned that tale into the story of two drifters, who find love on the road and are separated, eventually, by death.
From BBC ● Sep. 30, 2024
It has become an oasis for the disaffected, the drifters and the curious who are trying to escape the cutthroat competition and suffocating political environment of China’s megacities.
From New York Times ● Feb. 4, 2024
Where the old drifters keep moving sign used to hang, a new billboard in fancy lettering read: “You’re in trouble right there,” Mary Alice remarked to me.
From "A Long Way from Chicago" by Richard Peck
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
