What does itinerant mean?
Word: Itinerant
Part of Speech: Adjective
Meaning: Itinerant means moving from place to place instead of staying in one town, usually to find work or earn a living.
Synonyms: travelling
How do you spell itinerant?
Syllables: i - tin - er - ant
Tricky part: The final syllable is spoken so lightly that its vowel is easy to miss. It is ant, not ent, so itinerent is wrong.
Watch out for: itinerent, itinerint
Memory tip: Picture an ant trudging from village to village with a tiny bag: that ant travels at the end of the word.
Itinerant in a sentence
Example 1: Itinerant cobblers used to visit our lane once a month.
Example 2: The film follows an itinerant teacher who walks between hill villages in Uttarakhand.
Example 3: Many itinerant musicians of Rajasthan learn their songs from their parents.
Fun Fact
It goes back to a Latin word for a road or a way, which makes an itinerant worker, quite literally, a person of the road.
Practise the CREST Way
Word Cookie
Find the extra letter in the word:
itinnerant
a) n
b) a
c) r
d) t
Show answer
a) n. The word has no double letters at all.
Mingle-Mangle
Unscramble the jumbled word in the sentence and choose the correct word:
The eiinrttan storyteller reached our village every winter with his painted scrolls.
a) intolerant
b) itinerary
c) itinerant
d) ignorant
Show answer
c) itinerant. With no o in the jumble, ignorant and intolerant drop out at once, and itinerary needs a y.
Word Connection
Choose the antonym of the word itinerant as used in the sentence:
In those days itinerant puppeteers carried their stage from one village fair to the next.
a) nomadic
b) settled
c) roving
d) wandering
Show answer
b) settled. Settled people stay put, while roving, wandering and nomadic people do not.
Spell-o-Spell
Only one of these words is spelt correctly. Choose its meaning:
1. wayfairer 2. itinerant 3. sojurn 4. migrent
a) a person who moves to another place to work
b) a person who travels on foot
c) a short stay in a place
d) never staying long, as work takes you to new towns
Show answer
d) never staying long, as work takes you to new towns. The correct forms are migrant with ant, wayfarer with no i and sojourn with an o before the u.
Multiple Choice Questions
1. Which job would suit an itinerant worker best?
a) cleaning a single office block every night
b) teaching in the same village school for life
c) helping with each harvest in a new district
d) running one corner shop for thirty years
Show answer
c) helping with each harvest in a new district
2. What would an itinerant show probably lack?
a) a story that people enjoy
b) a permanent theatre of its own
c) a cast of trained performers
d) an audience at each stop
Show answer
b) a permanent theatre of its own
