circumforanean means wandering from market to market; vagabond, itinerant.
Why “circumforanean” is a great word
Wandering from market to market; itinerant, vagabond. From Latin circumforāneus ('wandering around markets,' from circum, 'around,' + forum, 'marketplace'), with the English suffix -an added. Unlike "itinerant" (which generalizes any traveling for work) or "peripatetic" (which suggests philosophical wandering), circumforanean carries the specific taint of the marketplace drifter. It is the knife-sharpening tinker with his pedal cart, the seller of dubious perfumes who claims each town for a single morning, or the fortune-teller whose tent folds smaller than her promises. There is something faintly suspect in the word, a whiff of the opportunist who smells the crowd rather than the soil, for whom no village is home and every fairground is temporary sanctuary.
Etymology
From Latin circumforaneus + -an.
adj
- Wandering from market to market; vagabond, itinerant.e.g.“[…] I am the bolder to insert, as not borrowed from circumforanean rogues and gypsies, but out of the writings of worthy philosophers and physicians […]”
Words closest in meaning
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