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loafer

noun
/ˈləʊfə/UK/ˈloʊfɚ/US

Etymology

Perhaps short for landloafer, possibly a partial translation of German Landläufer (compare dialectal German loofen (“to run”), and English landlouper); or more likely connected to Middle English love, loove, loffinge, looffinge (“a remnant, the rest, that which remains or lingers”), from Old English lāf (“remainder, residue, what is left”) (more at lave), which is akin to Scots lave (“the rest, remainder”), Old English lǣfan (“to let remain, leave behind”) (more at leave).

  1. derived from lāf — “remainder, residue, what is left”
  2. derived from love

Definitions

  1. An idle person.

  2. A shoe with no laces, resembling a moccasin.

    • Someone must explain to Sunak about the time bomb ticking beneath his £1,000 loafers.

  3. To loaf around

    To loaf around; to be idle.

  4. ›+ 2 more definitions

    1. A particular orthogonal spaceship in Conway's Game of Life that moves at a speed of c/7,…

      A particular orthogonal spaceship in Conway's Game of Life that moves at a speed of c/7, and the smallest such example.

    2. A wolf, especially a grey or timber wolf.

      • The great menace to livestock, other than the continual battle with cold, [...] was the gray wolf. [...] The big loafers came in from everywhere.
      • Cowboys had killed “loafers” at five hundred yards away with rifles. [...] Lucille was not like most cowhands and she sets out to capture the "loafer" with her lariat.
      • By the 1890s loafers had become such a problem that some newly organized counties, as well as certain cattle outfits, paid bounties for their scalps. For a cowboy making a dollar or so a day, wolf-hunting could be lucrative.

The neighborhood

Derived

loaferdom, loaferish

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for loafer. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA