Library / English Dictionary

ROAM

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

 I. (verb) 

Sense 1

Meaning:

Move about aimlessly or without any destination, often in search of food or employment

Example:

They rolled from town to town

Synonyms:

cast; drift; ramble; range; roam; roll; rove; stray; swan; tramp; vagabond; wander

Classified under:

Verbs of walking, flying, swimming

Hypernyms (to "roam" is one way to...):

go; locomote; move; travel (change location; move, travel, or proceed, also metaphorically)

Verb group:

drift; err; stray (wander from a direct course or at random)

wander (go via an indirect route or at no set pace)

Troponyms (each of the following is one way to "roam"):

maunder (wander aimlessly)

gad; gallivant; jazz around (wander aimlessly in search of pleasure)

Sentence frames:

Somebody ----s
Something is ----ing PP
Somebody ----s something
Somebody ----s PP

Sentence examples:

They roam the countryside

They roam in the countryside

Derivation:

roamer (someone who leads a wandering unsettled life)

Credits

 Context examples: 

Shingopana roamed the Cretaceous landscape alongside Rukwatitan bisepultus, another titanosaur the team described and named in 2014.

(Paleontologists discover new species of sauropod dinosaur in Tanzania, National Science Foundation)

These proteins roam the nucleus, perhaps as part of multiprotein complexes, and their target interactions are modulated by posttranslational modifications.

(HMGN Family Protein, NCI Thesaurus)

The thief or the murderer could roam London on such a day as the tiger does the jungle, unseen until he pounces, and then evident only to his victim.

(His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

All day Buck brooded by the pool or roamed restlessly about the camp.

(The Call of the Wild, by Jack London)

JunoCam data has detected atmospheric wave trains, towering atmospheric structures that trail one after the other as they roam the planet, with most concentrated near Jupiter's equator.

(NASA's Juno Mission Detects Jupiter Wave Trains, NASA)

Purportedly extinct creatures were actually roaming around the Karoo hundreds of thousands of years later than the time scientists had written them off.

(Mass extinction of land and sea biodiversity 250 million years ago not simultaneous, National Science Foundation)

Thus, in the early morning, instead of roaming and foraging, or lying in a sheltered nook, he would wait for hours on the cheerless cabin-stoop for a sight of the god's face.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

The moth roamed away.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Miss Clarissa and my aunt roam all over London, to find out articles of furniture for Dora and me to look at.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

I remembered that Challenger had declared that man could not exist upon the plateau, since with his feeble weapons he could not hold his own against the monsters who roamed over it.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)