Word.ws English Dictionary

trapse

trapse is the archaic form of traipse.

Meaning of traipse

Verb

traipse (third-person singular simple present traipses, present participle traipsing, simple past and past participle traipsed)

  1. (intransitive) To walk in a messy or unattractively casual way; to trail through dirt.
    • Lo next two slipshod Muses traipse along, In lofty madness, meditating song, / With tresses staring from poetic dreams, / And never wash'd, but in Castalia’s streams [...].1728, [Alexander Pope], “Book the Third”, in The Dunciad. An Heroic Poem. […], Dublin; London: […] A. Dodd, →OCLC, lines 140-144
  2. (colloquial, intransitive) To walk about, especially when expending much effort, or unnecessary effort.
    • After traipsing about in the fog they found the grave sure enough.1922, James Joyce, Ulysses
    Synonyms:
    gad, travel, walk
  3. (colloquial, intransitive) To travel with purpose; usually a significant or tedious amount.
    • While you were traipsing round Africa, I had to take care of mum and dad!
  4. (colloquial, transitive) To walk (a distance or journey) wearily or with effort
    • She only got handy the Union-house on Sunday morning 'a b'lieve, and 'tis supposed here and there that she had traipsed every step of the way from Melchester.1874, Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd
  5. (colloquial, transitive) to walk about or over (a place) aimlessly or insouciantly.

See all 7 meanings of traipse

Forms of trapse

third-person singular presenttrapses
present participletrapsing
past participletrapsed
pasttrapsed

Questions about trapse

What is trapse the archaic form of?
Trapse is the archaic form of traipse.

Words near trapse in the dictionary

  1. traps
  2. traps case
  3. traps cases
  4. traps in
  5. traps out
  6. trapse
  7. trapsed
  8. trapses
  9. trapset
  10. trapsets
  11. trapshoot

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: trapse (page history and authors); traipse (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.

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Cite this entry: “trapse.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/trapse. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.