v. [f. as prec. + -IZE.] intr. To live, wander, or go about as, or in the manner of, a vagabond; to roam or travel in a free, idle, unconstrained, or unconventional manner; to play the vagabond.
a. With indefinite it.
1611. Cotgr., Roder, to roame, wander, vagabondize it.
1776. Ann. Reg., Charact., 35/2. After thus vagabondizing it for some time, he was discovered by the consul.
1861. Reade, Cloister & H., liii. How much earlier he would have found her by staying quietly at Tergou, than by vagabondizing it all over Holland.
b. In ordinary use. Freq. with advs. and preps.
1794. Mrs. A. M. Bennett, Ellen, III. 39. No modest woman would go vagabondizing about the country.
1795. trans. Mercier’s Fragm. Pol. & Hist., II. 223. The streets would be filled with wretches, vagabondizing round the palaces of sloth.
1832. Westm. Rev., July, 38. Peoples among whom his fortunes cast him while vagabondizing in the remotest corners of the globe.
1868. Holme Lee, B. Godfrey, xxvi. That … scapegrace … had vagabondised all over Europe as a newspaper correspondent.
1894. D. C. Murray, Making of Novelist, 87. I … acquired a taste for vagabondising about among the poor.
fig. 1864. Miss Braddon, Doctor’s Wife, iii. The surgeon’s thoughts went vagabondizing away from the little coffee-room. Ibid. (1868), Birds of Prey, V. iii. My thoughts went vagabondising off to Charlotte.
Hence Vagabondizer.
1860. All Year Round, No. 42. 362. The itinerant traveller and poetical or artistic vagabondiser.
