traveler
Pluraltravelers
UK spellingtraveller
- 1A person who travels from place to place, especially one who journeys to distant lands.
Medieval travelers along the trade routes brought back tales of distant empires.
As a seasoned traveler, she packs everything into a single carry-on bag.
Similarvoyager, globetrotter
Note
The word has long carried distance and hazard with it: travelers lie under a desert storm in James Yoxall's The Lonely Pyramid, and Peter Hopkirk writes of the many who perished on the icy passes that approach the Taklamakan. John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) gives it a journey of the soul instead, promising the reader that the book "will make a Travailer of thee" and lead to the Holy Land.
- 2A person, particularly in the UK, who lives in a caravan (a trailer home), bus or other vehicle instead of a fixed home.
The council set aside a site where travelers could park their caravans for the winter.
As a traveler, he has lived in a converted bus for most of his adult life.
- 3A salesman who goes from place to place for a company, selling on its behalf.
The traveler for a Chicago shoe company arrived every spring with two cases of samples.
Travelers for the big wholesale houses spent most of the year on the road, taking orders from small-town shops.
Note
Sample cases and sales territories are the world of this use, and it now sounds dated. The job today is more often called a traveling salesman or a sales representative, so the older word fits best in writing about earlier times, or wherever a company, a route or a case of samples makes the meaning clear.
- 4A list and record of instructions that follows a part in a manufacturing process.
- 5One of the wires connecting the two members of a pair of three-way switches.
- 6A rail or track for a sliding curtain.
- 7A metal ring that moves freely on part of a ship’s rigging.
- 8A sheet of paper that is circulated with the board of cards, on which players record their scores.
- 9A styrofoam cup filled with liquor and usually ice, to be taken away from a place.
Practice
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Origin
Formed from travel + the suffix -er.