(n.) One who stays away from business or any duty; especially, one who stays out of school without leave; an idler; a loiterer; a shirk.
(a.) Wandering from business or duty; loitering; idle, and shirking duty; as, a truant boy.
(v. i.) To idle away time; to loiter, or wander; to play the truant.
(v. t.) To idle away; to waste.
Example Sentences:
(1) Up to 20% of the senior school pupils may truant in a 2-week period and teachers report these youngsters to be more aggressive and to show more neurotic symptoms then the regular school attenders.
(2) Having more money to spend, working at a part-time job, spending more evenings out with a mixed-sex peer group, at a youth club, or out dancing, and playing truant from school were all associated with an increased risk of smoking.
(3) Despite the sample's relatively accurate knowledge about drugs and HIV infection, truants scored less well on these and other HIV-related issues.
(4) Actually, that’s just what he does, writing (apparently in retrospect from California) about three days in December 1949 when, having been chastised by his school “for not applying myself”, he plays truant over a long and memorable weekend in Manhattan.
(5) The truants, compared with their non-truanting peers, had three times the level of solvent misuse (14% compared with 4%), thrice the soft drug misuse (19% compared with 6%), and four times the involvement with hard drugs (9% compared with 2%).
(6) Young women were more likely than young men to be showing signs of distress, with a report earlier this week claiming that one in five teenage girls are opting out of classroom discussions and even playing truant because they hate the way they look.
(7) After she accused a neighbour of attempting to rape her, the 10-year-old Holiday, an incorrigible truant, was sent to a Catholic reform school until her mother secured her release.
(8) At 16, he starred as a boy playing truant in the short black-and-white film Boy and Bicycle (1965), directed by Ridley, who was studying at the Royal College of Art.
(9) It comes to something when a documentary series featuring yobs, truants, swearing at teachers, swearing by teachers, cyber-bullying and teenage pregnancy makes you believe in the education system again.
(10) The sections, imprints, and smears were examined by fluorescent microscopy with the use of Truant's modification of the auramine-rhodamine stain.
(11) Cluster analysis of information collected in a standard way indicated that there was a group of children with the features of 'school refusal' who often had generalized neurotic disorders as well and who were mostly girls, another group with the features of 'truancy' all of whom had conduct disorders who were mainly boys, and a third cluster of children who were usually 'truants' but less often psychiatrically disturbed.
(12) I have had to deal with runaway teens, stealing, drug and alcohol misuse, suicide, child-on-parent violence and truanting from school.
(13) Comparisons were made between alcoholics and nonalcoholics in a sample of Danish adoptees (mean age 30) and it was found that the alcoholics, as children, were more often hyperactive, truant, antisocial, shy, aggressive, disobedient, and friendless.
(14) Two modal types of truants were delineated: "authority defying" and "peer phobic."
(15) Truants differed little from non-truants regarding their drinking habits, but were more prone to being heavy smokers.
(16) Taliban officials even patrolled schools with attendance sheets and hauled truanting boys from their homes.
(17) She was always encouraging them to be lawyers despite their constant truanting.
(18) "That's why I have asked our social policy review to look into whether we should cut the benefits of those parents whose children constantly play truant.
(19) Paul Kelly, the headmaster of Monkseaton High School near Newcastle, has adopted a later start to the school day and this is having a marked impact, with reduced truanting and improved exam success .
(20) More than 30,000 children deemed to be petty thieves, truants or from dysfunctional families – a category that often included unmarried mothers – were sent to Ireland's austere network of industrial schools, reformatories, orphanages and hostels from the 1930s until the last facilities shut in the 1990s.