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say it: stray
stray is a verb, adjective and noun meaning "move about aimlessly or without any destination, often in search of food or employment". It is pronounced /ˈstɹeɪ/ — stray. It carries 6 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”
(of an animal) having no home or having wandered away from home
“a stray calf”
“a stray dog”
an animal that has strayed (especially a domestic animal)
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 stray 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.