roving
roving Lexical Profile
roving Game Scores & Validity
• adjective
Moving or traveling constantly from place to place without a fixed destination or station; wandering.
"As a roving correspondent for the newspaper, she spent the year reporting from dozens of rural communities."
• noun
The act or habit of wandering, roaming, or traveling from place to place without a fixed destination.
"After years of roving across the continent, the musician finally decided to buy a cottage and settle down."
A long, narrow bundle of carded and combed textile fibers, such as wool or cotton, drawn out and slightly twisted in preparation for spinning into yarn.
"The artisan carefully fed thedyed wool roving into the spinning wheel to create a smooth, two-ply yarn."
A form of field archery in which archers walk across open country and shoot at randomly chosen natural targets at unmeasured distances.
"Unlike target archery on a flat range, roving challenges archers to judge distances over uneven terrain."
• Rhymes for roving
Word Origin & Etymology
The wandering and piratical senses derive from Middle English 'roven' (to shoot arrows at random marks or practice piracy), adopted from Middle Dutch or Middle Low German 'roven' (to rob). The textile sense has a distinct origin, likely stemming from a northern English and Scots dialectal word 'rove', related to Old Norse 'reifa' (to wrap or swaddle).