What's the difference between loiter and wander?

Loiter


Definition:

  • (v. i.) To be slow in moving; to delay; to linger; to be dilatory; to spend time idly; to saunter; to lag behind.
  • (v. i.) To wander as an idle vagrant.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Neither in nor out of the house, visible but not seen, you could lurk here for an hour undisturbed, you could loiter for a day.
  • (2) Ward ignored a weak challenge from young Darnell Furlong as two more experienced Rangers’ players loitered in the vicinity with little intent, then Ward made his way into the box and struck a shot that deflected off Sandro into the net.
  • (3) Grafitti cakes his entrance hall, there is no heating, the lift has been broken for months and unemployed youths loiter with nothing to do.
  • (4) She wouldn't be found haunting the scene of the crime, as it were; loitering in the kitchen, in the maternity ward, at the school gate.
  • (5) As he puts it in his book Cities Under Siege: "The possibility of deploying swarms of armed and unarmed robots to loiter persistently across regions of the world deemed trouble spots is clearly a good fit with the Pentagon's latest thinking surrounding the long war."
  • (6) No wonder Roger Burman, Winterhill's barrel-chested headteacher, was beaming on Thursday morning as he welcomed a line of nervous teenagers into the school hall, some of whom confessed they had been awake since 5am ("and I usually get up at 1pm", giggled Amy Jones as she loitered outside).
  • (7) Deborah Kerr's screen name had loitered for a dozen years somewhere in the back of my brain.
  • (8) This game had ambled along cagily for almost half an hour, Uruguay tigerishly setting about stifling any hint of Colombian ascendancy, when Abel Aguilar nodded the ball forward to Rodríguez, loitering with his back to goal in a pocket of space just outside the Uruguay penalty area.
  • (9) 2.27am BST Ringside Kevin Mitchell in Las Vegas writes: Although there is a lot of loitering still, this terrific arena already has given Ashley Theophane his biggest audience, maybe half of the 16,000 capacity.
  • (10) Shani Pinney, a department official, said on Monday that such offenders were barred from working or volunteering in schools and from “loitering on school property”.
  • (11) It was barely disrupted when Darmian – who had at times looked a weak link after loitering in possession – dislocated a shoulder after challenging for a 50-50 ball with Khazri and was replaced by Donald Love, a Scotland Under-21 international.
  • (12) But stagnation remains the cloud loitering overhead, and, if the economy sulks its way through 2012 and living standards continue to fall, the polls may shift as voters' patience wears out.
  • (13) Analyses by five major diagnostic groups showed that patients with a primary diagnosis of drug or alcohol abuse had the greatest overall frequency of arrests and also the greatest frequency of arrests for burglary, offenses against public order such as peace disturbance or loitering, and probation and parole violations.
  • (14) As conditions are made safe for these blithe cretins they become more dangerous for Sherpas, whose job is to loiter in the dangerous parts of the mountain and secure them for ever greater numbers of incompetents to hurry through, en route to their photographs on the top of the world.
  • (15) "This guy is making me lose my concentration," he complains later as another man loiters nearby.
  • (16) In the suburb of Wilberforce, in an old building for the telecommunications company Airtel, a dozen students loiter on a wall waiting to relieve staff from the trauma at the Ebola hotline they are manning.
  • (17) Father Toño, who moved here from Madrid 14 years ago, chats over coffee while his guards – whose presence is the result of death threats from drug traffickers – loiter outside.
  • (18) While protest charges have typically been seen as tantamount to nuisance crimes, like trespassing or loitering, these were different.
  • (19) A berry meringue roulade to whip sad whites into shape and a thick, sharp lemon curd to save the souls of any feckless yolks left loitering about your fridge.
  • (20) Time to loiter in bookshops and catch a nice boy's eye over a copy of Patti Smith's autobiography?

Wander


Definition:

  • (v. i.) To ramble here and there without any certain course or with no definite object in view; to range about; to stroll; to rove; as, to wander over the fields.
  • (v. i.) To go away; to depart; to stray off; to deviate; to go astray; as, a writer wanders from his subject.
  • (v. i.) To be delirious; not to be under the guidance of reason; to rave; as, the mind wanders.
  • (v. t.) To travel over without a certain course; to traverse; to stroll through.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) 3-hydroxy-3-methyl-glutaryl-CoA (HMG-CoA) lyase activity was determined by the recently described spectrophotometric method of Wanders et al.
  • (2) Ready to be fleeced and swamped, I wandered cautiously along Laugavegur past the lovely independent shops, the clean, friendly streets and ended up in a fun hipsterish bar called the Lebowski, where they serve Tuborg and the craft burgers are named things like The Walter (I ordered The Nihilist).
  • (3) Residents had called police after spotting a man wandering around the park and yelling incoherently.
  • (4) Wandering is movement changing over time and, thus, is a nonlinear ultradian rhythm, with locomoting and nonlocomoting phases.
  • (5) Fox will be accompanied by the sporting director, Hendrik Almstadt, on the back of the 1-1 draw against Wycombe Wanderers in the FA Cup on Saturday, when their failure to beat a League Two side culminated in angry scenes involving the away supporters.
  • (6) I would like to place on record our sincere thanks to Owen, Sandy Stewart [Coyle's assistant] and Steve Davis [coach] for all their hard work during their time at Bolton Wanderers."
  • (7) On a dreich November evening in Gourock, a red-coated mongrel is wandering between the seats in a room above a pub, pausing to sniff handbags for hidden treats.
  • (8) 7.13pm BST The starting XIs England: Hart (Oxford University), Walker (Barnes), Cahill (Harrow Chequers), Jagielka (Cambridge University), Baines (1st Surrey Rifles), Wilshere (Old Harrovians), Gerrard (Wanderers), Walcott (Swifts), Cleverley (Old Carthusians), Welbeck (Royal Engineers), Rooney (Old Etonians).
  • (9) Boy, a new play by Leo Butler , follows Liam, a 17-year-old Neet (not in education, employment or training) for 24 hours as he wanders the capital, trying to find friends, connect with a family who have given up on him and with community services that communicate so differently from the way Liam does, it seems like they are speaking another language.
  • (10) An electronic security system can improve the quality of life for alert, oriented patients (and their families) who share a unit with confused, wandering patients.
  • (11) Hagere Selam remains a modest place of mudwalled shops with corrugated roofs, cows, donkeys and sheep wandering unpaved streets and children idling away an afternoon at table football – a generation with no memory of the famine that killed hundreds of thousands and woke up the world.
  • (12) He's fouled out on the right, and takes the free kick very quickly, taking advantage of a wandering Krol, but the referee deems the kick was not take from the right place, and was probably moving as well.
  • (13) For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths."
  • (14) Larry Page, Google's chief executive, believes self-driving cars have enormous economic and health implications: they should cut the number of road deaths, either through drivers' attention wandering, or through driving too close to other cars and being unable to react.
  • (15) After scarfing platefuls of seafood on the terrace, we wandered down to the harbour where two fishermen, kitted out in wetsuits, were setting out by boat across the clear turquoise water to collect goose barnacles.
  • (16) Distribution of the recurrence was different: some previous sites had apparently become refractory and remained clear, some involvement had recurred in the same site, and new areas of involvement had appeared, causing the eruption to "wander," as is often seen in acute fixed drug eruption due to acetaminophen.
  • (17) She manifested not only episodic bulimia, impulsive self-injury, suicidal attempt, and obvious depressive emotion; but also self-provoked-vomiting, wandering, stealing and lying.
  • (18) Baseline wander and muscle artifact are particularly troublesome sources of interference.
  • (19) O’Malley, the only candidate to wander into the spin room, was asked if he thought he had broken through.
  • (20) Individuals have shown transient AV block, irregular sinus rhythm, wandering pacemaker, and inverted T waves.