drifting

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of drift.

   Snow kept drifting across the highway throughout the night.

   She caught herself drifting away from the main topic.

   Note

   Two grammars hide in this form, because drift is both intransitive and transitive. Intransitively the thing moves on its own (snow kept drifting across the highway). Transitively the wind or current does the work, driving the snow into heaps. With be it forms the progressive. As a gerund it acts as a noun, where it shades into the noun for the act.

2. 2
   adjective

   Moving aimlessly, or carried along by external forces rather than by its own power.

   Like a balloon let loose in the open air, moving wherever the wind carries it.

   The drifting raft was finally spotted miles offshore.

   Rescue teams tracked the drifting lifeboat through the night.

   Similarfloating, aimless, rudderless, unmoored

   Oppositeanchored

3. 3
   adjective

   Lacking direction, focus, or a clear goal.

   Like a ship without a rudder, moving steadily but never toward any port.

   Years of drifting ambition left her with no real career.

   The committee's drifting discussion produced no decisions.

   Similaraimless, directionless, rudderless, unfocused, purposeless

   Oppositefocused, purposeful, directed

   Note

   The figurative step from the literal 'carried along' sense: a person carried by circumstance rather than by will. It works above all as a character word, set among adjectives of temperament. Yeats calls Ernest Dowson "gentle, affectionate, drifting" in The Trembling of the Veil (1922), against the stern, strong-minded Lionel Johnson. It takes no comparative: someone is drifting, not more drifting.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   A driving technique in which the driver deliberately oversteers, making the rear wheels lose traction while keeping control through a corner.

   Drifting requires precise throttle control and quick steering corrections.

   The crowd cheered as his drifting continued cleanly through the entire bend.

   Note

   Motor racing turns the everyday 'carried along' sense on its head. Elsewhere a drifting thing is at the mercy of forces, but here the slide is chosen and held. The driver provokes rear-wheel slip, then balances throttle, steering angle and weight transfer to keep the car sliding from corner entry to exit. It is a mass noun for the discipline and a countable one for individual slides.

5. 5
   noununcountable

   The action or process of something moving along while carried by an external force.

   The drifting of the continents happens over millions of years.

   Sailors measured the drifting of the wreck as the tide pulled it seaward.

   Similarmovement, motion

   Note

   Weather reports use it as a mass noun for snow driven across roads. Trains Illustrated wrote of the January blizzard of 1960 that north of Inverness "there was drifting that held up traffic." The plural names separate spells of drifting, as in Mazo de la Roche's "romantic driftings on the lake." Unlike the material that drifts, this is the movement itself, not what it carries.

6. 6
   noununcountable

   The matter or material that is carried along by a current of wind or water.

   The drifting that collected against the fence came from the fields upwind.

   Fishermen avoided the drifting that clogged the channel after the flood.

   Similardebris

   Note

   Here the noun names the stuff rather than the motion: whatever wind or water has carried along. Keats uses the plural in Isabella (1820) for "the rich-ored driftings of the flood," the ore-bearing sediment that men stood all day in the river to gather. That line shows the word's natural partner: the flood, current or wind that did the carrying.

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