Human-verified examples from authoritative sources
Exact Expressions
60 human-written examples
His favourite directors, Ken Loach and Antonia Bird, have cast him as everything from a Glaswegian bus driver caught up in the Nicaraguan civil war to a homicidal vagrant.
The series' match of bleak gunplay to everyday domesticity resurfaces in the crisp, clattering arthouse thriller Blue Ruin (Channel 4 DVD, 15), its slow-smouldering story of a Virginia vagrant on a complicated revenge trail calling to mind the Coen brothers in its ruthless structural efficiency and tar-dark humour.
The son of an unlettered vagrant , he has a business degree from Mumbai University and several small companies: a mobile-phone shop, a printing business, also a share in a co-operative bank.
Davis abandoned conventional major and minor harmonies for modal and pentatonic patterns (first fully aired in 1959 on the album Kind of Blue), a plunge into a vagrant harmonic no-man's-land that unfortunately infected much of jazz.
Without a council he stopped many ecclesiastical abuses in Rome, disciplined vagrant clergy, and introduced firmer asceticism in the papal court, but his approach was harsh and severe.
Ironweed (1983), which brought Kennedy widespread acclaim and won him the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, recounts a few days in the life of Francis Phelan Billy Phelann's father), an alcoholic vagrant drifting through life in Albany at the height of the Depression.
The evening opens with a hilarious sketch between a blind, vagrant violinist and an irascible cripple in a wheelchair, who form one of those dangerously symbiotic relationships that you get all over Beckett (from the tramps in Godot to Mercier and Camier).
He is also a thinker, an intellectual, capable of quoting Nietzsche or coming up with the etymology of "vagrant".
Handsome Chinese vagrant draws fans of 'homeless chic' 11.
Now he recounts how, over a catastrophic harvest week, other incomers – first a vagrant family uprooted by enclosure from their homes, then a gaggle of sinister gentlemen and strong-arm enforcers – sound a death-knell for the old, collective virtues.
When, in the title-track, he encounters a doom-mongering vagrant proclaiming the end of the world, in his emotional distress he can't help but see his personal sense of loss as equivalent to, or indicative of, the diminishing integrity of the world as a whole.
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Real-world application tested
The word "vagrant" functions primarily as a noun to describe a person without a home or as an adjective to characterize something as wandering or unsettled. Ludwig's examples demonstrate its usage in various contexts, from describing a homeless individual to characterizing harmonic patterns in music.
Expression frequency: Very common
