wandering

American

[won-der-ing] / ˈwɒn dər ɪŋ /

adjective

moving from place to place without a fixed plan; roaming; rambling.

Crowds of wandering tourists crossed the square.
having no permanent residence; nomadic.

They were historically a wandering people, moving seasonally through the area.
meandering; winding.

They followed a wandering path down the mountain.

noun

an aimless roving about; leisurely traveling from place to place.

For our honeymoon we had a period of delightful wandering through Italy.
Usually wanderings.
1. aimless travels; meanderings.
  
  Her wanderings took her all over the world.
2. disordered thoughts or utterances; incoherencies.
  
  mental wanderings;
  the wanderings of delirium.
seemingly aimless or random movement from one place to another by a person with a mental or cognitive disability or impairment.

Wandering by Alzheimer’s patients is a problem in nursing homes.

Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

Inflected Forms

Nouns

wanderings

plural

Etymology

Origin of wandering

First recorded before 1000; Middle English (noun, adjective), Old English wandrigende (adjective); see wander ( def. ), -ing ² ( def. ), -ing ¹ ( def. )

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:

wandering wanderings

“Are we wandering aimlessly or do we have a destination?”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 28, 2026

And, with the museum’s dim lighting, dated technology and underutilized areas, it can feel at times as if one is wandering in a past-its-prime shopping mall or in the forgotten corner of an airport terminal.

From Salon ● Sep. 25, 2026

This network seems to engage with our self-referential thinking and autobiographical memory—the sorts of things we think about when we are at rest, our minds wandering.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 18, 2026

The Los Angeles River was still pretty much what it had been for eons: a wandering river of the West, often nothing more than damp wetlands in summer, but quickening into rushwaters in winter.

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 17, 2026

“I did. I did do that. When I was a wandering soul, the cottage was the only light in the forest. Seemed wrong to leave it dark for too long.”

From "The Undead Fox of Deadwood Forest" by Aubrey Hartman

Throughout his wanderings to piece together her identity, we are never given a definitive explanation of why this woman captivates him.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 11, 2026

Inside this edition, Cranach's map presents the stations of the wilderness wanderings and the division of the Promised Land into twelve tribal regions.

From Science Daily ● Nov. 30, 2025

Francis, meanwhile, continued his anthropological wanderings, carrying whatever insights or regrets he gained from that night into his studies of other cultures' sacred rituals.

From Salon ● Apr. 19, 2025

As I Walk This Tidal Path is based on psychogeographic wanderings in the Thames estuary.

From BBC ● Jun. 19, 2024

Finally, at the end of all our wanderings, we return to our tiny, fragile, blue-white world, lost in a cosmic ocean vast beyond our most courageous imaginings.

From "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023