loaferとは 意味・読み方・使い方

発音

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /ˈləʊfə/
• (General American) IPA: /ˈloʊfɚ/
• 韻: -əʊfə(ɹ)

語源 1

Perhaps short for landloafer, possibly a partial translation of German Landläufer (compare dialectal German loofen (“to run”), and English landlouper); or more likely connected to 中期英語 love, loove, loffinge, looffinge (“a remnant, the rest, that which remains or lingers”), from 古期英語 lāf (“remainder, residue, what is left”) (more at lave), which is akin to Scots lave (“the rest, remainder”), 古期英語 lǣfan (“to let remain, leave behind”) (more at leave).

名詞

loafer (plural loafers)

1. An idle person.
   • 1887, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, page 39:

     The garden was bounded by a three-foot brick wall with a fringe of wood rails upon the top, and against this wall was leaning a stalwart police constable, surrounded by a small knot of loafers, who craned their necks and strained their eyes in the vain hope of catching some glimpse of the proceedings within.

   • 1923, George Washington Ogden, “Chapter 2”, in The Baron of Diamond Tail:

     Along this unequal way, where loafers sat on whittled benches, lounged in doorways, leaned against porch props, Dan Gustin went pegging in his high-heeled boots like a mule in a Mexican chain hobble, holding a straight course for the hotel, past the doors of temptation.

2. A shoe with no laces, resembling a moccasin.
   • 2023 May 31, Nigel Harris, “Comment: GBR now! We have no Plan B”, in RAIL, number 984, page 3:

     Someone must explain to Sunak about the time bomb ticking beneath his £1,000 loafers.

同意語

• (idle person): bum, bumpkin, footler, idler, lout, yob, yobbo
• (footwear): penny loafer
• See also Thesaurus:idler

派生語

動詞

loafer (third-person singular simple present loafers, present participle loafering, simple past and past participle loafered)

1. (dialect, intransitive) To loaf around; to be idle.

語源 2

Named due to having a loaf in several of its stages.

名詞

loafer (plural loafers)

1. (cellular automata) A particular orthogonal spaceship in Conway's Game of Life that moves at a speed of c/7, and the smallest such example.

語源 3

Borrowed from Spanish lobo (“wolf”), reinterpreted as or conflated with loafer (“idler”); compare the alternative forms which reflect other re-interpretations and conflations. Doublet of lupus and wolf.

別の表記

• lobo, lobo wolf
• lofer (wolf), lover (wolf), loper (wolf)

名詞

loafer (plural loafers)

1. (Southwestern US dialects) A wolf, especially a grey or timber wolf.
   • 1964, Ike Blasingame, Dakota Cowboy: My Life in the Old Days, page 72:

     The great menace to livestock, other than the continual battle with cold, [...] was the gray wolf. [...] The big loafers came in from everywhere.

   • 2010, Cynthia K. Rhodes, Lucille Mulhall: An Athlete of Her Time, →ISBN:

     Cowboys had killed “loafers” at five hundred yards away with rifles. [...] Lucille was not like most cowhands and she sets out to capture the "loafer" with her lariat.

   • 2016, Patrick Dearen, A Cowboy of the Pecos, page 128:

     By the 1890s loafers had become such a problem that some newly organized counties, as well as certain cattle outfits, paid bounties for their scalps. For a cowboy making a dollar or so a day, wolf-hunting could be lucrative.

使用する際の注意点

• Often used in compound with "wolf": "loafer wolf".

Further reading

• Robert N. Smead, Vocabulario Vaquero/Cowboy Talk: A Dictionary of Spanish Terms from the American West

アナグラム

• Falero, floræ, Florea, florae