STRAGGLER

Pronunciation (US):

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does straggler mean? 

• STRAGGLER (noun)
  The noun STRAGGLER has 1 sense:

1. someone who strays or falls behind

  Familiarity information: STRAGGLER used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• STRAGGLER (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Someone who strays or falls behind

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Synonyms:

straggler; strayer

Hypernyms ("straggler" is a kind of...):

dawdler; drone; laggard; lagger; poke; trailer (someone who takes more time than necessary; someone who lags behind)

Derivation:

straggle (wander from a direct or straight course)

 Context examples 

I was surprised, when I came within sight of our office-door, to see the ticket-porters standing outside talking together, and some half-dozen stragglers gazing at the windows which were shut up.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

The stragglers who had dotted the grass had closed in until the huge crowd was one unit with a single mighty voice, which was already beginning to bellow its impatience.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

I walked with the utmost circumspection, to avoid treading on any stragglers who might remain in the streets, although the orders were very strict, that all people should keep in their houses, at their own peril.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

The funeral held at noon was all completed, and the last stragglers of the mourners had taken themselves lazily away, when, looking carefully from behind a clump of alder-trees, we saw the sexton lock the gate after him.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

Let us rest here, said St. John, as we reached the first stragglers of a battalion of rocks, guarding a sort of pass, beyond which the beck rushed down a waterfall; and where, still a little farther, the mountain shook off turf and flower, had only heath for raiment and crag for gem—where it exaggerated the wild to the savage, and exchanged the fresh for the frowning—where it guarded the forlorn hope of solitude, and a last refuge for silence.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)