flaneur
/flɑːˈnɜː(ɹ)/US/flɑˈnʊɚ/
flaneur noun: one who wanders aimlessly, who roams, who travels at a lounging pace. One who walks to observe and enjoy rather than to get somewhere.
Noun
flaneur (plural flaneurs)
- One who wanders aimlessly, who roams, who travels at a lounging pace. One who walks to observe and enjoy rather than to get somewhere.
- […]Bevil drew him up to the door-step of a house close by, where, on certain evenings, a well-known club drew together men who seldom meet so familiarly elsewhere—men of all callings; a club especially favoured by wits, authors, and the flaneurs of polite society.1873, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, chapter VI, in The Parisians, book IX
- It often seemed to Mallet that he wholly lacked the prime requisite of a graceful flâneur—the simple, sensuous, confident relish of pleasure.1875 January–December, Henry James, Jr., “Rowland”, in Roderick Hudson, Boston, Mass.: James R[ipley] Osgood and Company, late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co., published 1876, →OCLC...
- An idler, a loafer.
- The Byrons and Brookes who had defied life from mountain tops were in the end but flaneurs and poseurs, at best mistaking the shadow of courage for the substance of wisdom.1920 April, F[rancis] Scott Fitzgerald, chapter 5, in This Side of Paradise, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, →OCLC, book II (The Education of a Personage), pages 282–283
- Synonyms:
- bum, couch potato, dawdler, deadbeat, dogfucker, do-naught, do-nothing, dosser, idler, idleton
Verb
flaneur (third-person singular simple present flaneurs, present participle flaneuring, simple past and past participle flaneured)
- To wander aimlessly or at a lounging pace. To walk to observe and enjoy rather than to get somewhere.
- Meantime, we flaneured about the Guernsey market, and a remarkable pretty sight it was this bright morning.1867, The Ladies' Cabinet of Fashion, Music & Romance, page 64
- Still, I wrote him often, and although I missed him, through autumn I contentedly flaneured about. At Alchemy's Christmas break we flew to Paris and stayed at Nathaniel's flat on Rue du Cherche-Midi. The three of us would lahdidah to the Luxembourg Gardens, where we read Alchemy the French canon of...2015, Bruce Bauman, Broken Sleep, Other Press, LLC, →ISBN
flaneur meaning in Urdu and Malay
flaneur in Urdu
- مٹر گشتی کرنے والا
flaneur in Malay
- one who wanders aimlessly
- pelanur, flanur
Examples of flaneur in a sentence
- More than any other urban type, the flaneur suggests the contradictions of the modern city, caught between the insistent mobility of the present and the visible weight of the past.1994 October, Priscilla Ferguson, “3 The Flâneur: The City and Its Discontents”, in Paris As Revolution, page 80:
- Portsmouth is a flaneur’s dream come true, a place that simply begs to be explored randomly and on foot.2009 October, Barry Estabrook, “Good Living”, in Gourmet, page 57:
- Still, I wrote him often, and although I missed him, through autumn I contentedly flaneured about.2015, Bruce Bauman, Broken Sleep, Other Press, LLC, →ISBN:
- Flaneuring, at its essence, is the art of wandering aimlessly through urban environments, observing the world with a curious and open mind.2019, Erika Owen, The Art of Flaneuring:
Synonyms of flaneur
30 more synonymsFewer synonyms
Forms of flaneur
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | flaneurs |
| alternative form | flâneur |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | flaneurs |
| present participle | flaneuring |
| past participle | flaneured |
| past | flaneured |
Origin of flaneur
From French flâneur (“loafer, idler, dawdler, loiterer”).
Words formed from flaneur
Questions about flaneur
- What does flaneur mean?
- Flaneur means one who wanders aimlessly, who roams, who travels at a lounging pace. One who walks to observe and enjoy rather than to get somewhere.
- What is flaneur in Urdu?
- Flaneur in Urdu is مٹر گشتی کرنے والا. See Flaneur meaning in Urdu.
- How do you use flaneur in a sentence?
- More than any other urban type, the flaneur suggests the contradictions of the modern city, caught between the insistent mobility of the present and the visible weight of the past.
- What part of speech is flaneur?
- Flaneur can be a noun or a verb.
- How do you pronounce flaneur?
- Flaneur is pronounced /flɑːˈnɜː(ɹ)/ (UK).
- What is the plural of flaneur?
- The plural of flaneur is flaneurs.
Words near flaneur in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: flaneur (page history and authors); flaneur (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-flaneur.wav.
Cite this entry: “flaneur.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/flaneur. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.