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say it: drift
drift is a verb and noun meaning "be in motion due to some air or water current". It carries 17 recorded senses.
move about aimlessly or without any destination, often in search of food or employment
“The gypsies roamed the woods”
“roving vagabonds”
“the wandering Jew”
“The cattle roam across the prairie”
“the laborers drift from one town to the next”
“They rolled from town to town”
move in an unhurried fashion
“The unknown young man drifted among the invited guests”
be piled up in banks or heaps by the force of wind or a current
“snow drifting several feet high”
“sand drifting like snow”
the gradual departure from an intended course due to external influences (as a ship or plane)
ship · airplane
a process of linguistic change over a period of time
a general tendency to change (as of opinion)
“not openly liberal but that is the trend of the book”
“a broad movement of the electorate to the right”
a horizontal (or nearly horizontal) passageway in a mine
“they dug a drift parallel with the vein”
mining
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for drift come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.