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adrift

adjectiveadverbattested in dialogue

  • //əˈdɹɪft//

Floating at random.

adjective

  1. 1

    Floating at random.

    So on the sea she shall be set adrift.

  2. 2

    Absent from his watch.

  3. 3

    Behind one's opponents, or below a required threshold in terms of score, number or position.

    The team were six points adrift of their rivals.

    The Czech Republic in 1994-95, with a pegged nominal exchange rate and nominal deposit rates of 7 percent, was several percentage points adrift of the interest parity condition.

    He did well, coming second, but Toyota and Mitsubishi were now neck-and-neck, with the Subaru team 38 points adrift of the leaders.

    Boro were left needing snookers after a toothless goalless draw with Dead Men Walking Doncaster left them well adrift and fading in the chase for a Championship play-off place.

Etymology

From a- + drift.

adverb

  1. 1

    In a drifting condition; at the mercy of wind and waves.

    things wore on till eight or nine o'clock, every thing getting adrift and being smashed, and every one on board jamming themselves up in corners or holding on to beams to prevent their going adrift likewise

Forms

comparative
more adrift
superlative
most adrift
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).