Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun An idle, gossiping saunterer; one who habitually strolls about idly.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun One who strolls about aimlessly; a lounger; a loafer.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun One who wanders aimlessly, who roams, who travels at a lounging pace.
  • noun An idler, a loafer.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From French flâneur ("loafer, idler, dawdler, loiterer").

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Examples

  • He was called a flaneur, one who strolled the arcades.

    A Father's 10 Lessons for His Daughters (VIDEO) 2010

  • The flaneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through a city without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the place and in covert search of adventure and knowledge.

    'Life of a Bluestocking' now showing at Apartment Bluestocking 2008

  • The flaneur is a multilayered palimpsest that allows us to move from real products of modernity to a critical appreciation of the state of modernity and its erosion into the past.

    Archive 2008-12-01 Bluestocking 2008

  • The flaneur is a multilayered palimpsest that allows us to move from real products of modernity to a critical appreciation of the state of modernity and its erosion into the past.

    'Life of a Bluestocking' now showing at Apartment Bluestocking 2008

  • The flaneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through a city without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the place and in covert search of adventure and knowledge.

    Archive 2008-12-01 Bluestocking 2008

  • ‘the flaneur is a loiterer, a stroller who ambles through the city without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the city, its history and secrets’.

    flaneurie - the passionate observer Bluestocking 2008

  • ‘the flaneur is a loiterer, a stroller who ambles through the city without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the city, its history and secrets’.

    Archive 2008-01-01 Bluestocking 2008

  • The word "flaneur" is italicized because it is not English, but possibly also for emphasis ... if the sentence had read "The Major is a _fool_", with the word "fool" italicized, it would clearly be emphasis.

    The Project Gutenberg FAQ 2002 Jim Tinsley

  • The analogy of the SL experience as like visiting a city is spot on, you can be a homeless wanderer, drifting through collecting freebies, picking random spots on the map or typing silly words into search, in many ways similar to the aesthetically guided roamings of the literary "flaneur" or the aleatory encounters of the situationist "derive" … Philip Guest described SL in his book Second Lives as "a low level search for each other" ..

    Second Life Games Ed Hardy Toys 2009

  • 'flaneur', and fop, who, according to the world, had misused a wife, misled her brother, robbed widows and orphans, squandered a fortune, become drunkard and wastrel, and at last had lost his life in

    The Right of Way — Complete Gilbert Parker 1897

Comments

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  • "One who strolls about aimlessly; a lounger; a loafer."

    November 15, 2007

  • "The sidewalk flaneurs get as much out of the Web as the ranchers do, if not more."

    —Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map (New York: Penguin, 2006), 237

    October 4, 2008

  • See also flâneur.

    October 4, 2008

  • In the 1960s, the French Situationists coined the term ‘psychogeography' to describe a radical method of mapping cities. Through aimless walks, they would recover what was unnoticed in the urban landscape, performing a phrenology of all nooks and crannies in the Parisian metropolis.

    -Nika Stella-Sawicka, Will modern-day flaneurs help rebuild fragmented communities?

    September 30, 2009

  • JM is a purposeful flaneur.

    February 17, 2011

  • A thoughtful discussion of the flaneur, and indeed the cyberflaneur, is to be found here. And a lovely Caillebotte.

    March 29, 2013