loafer

plural loafers

1. An idle person.

   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.

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

   1 more example

   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.

   1887, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, page 39

   Synonyms: bum, bumpkin, footler, idler, lout, yob, yobbo

2. A shoe with no laces, resembling a moccasin.

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

   2023 May 31, Nigel Harris, “Comment: GBR now! We have no Plan B”, in RAIL, number 984, page 3

present singular third person loafers · participle present loafering · participle past loafered · past loafered

1. dialectalintransitiveTo loaf around; to be idle.

plural loafers

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

plural loafers · alternative lobo · alternative lobo wolf · alternative lofer · alternative lover · alternative loper

1. SouthwesternUSdialectalA wolf, especially a grey or timber wolf.

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

   1964, Ike Blasingame, Dakota Cowboy: My Life in the Old Days, page 72

   2 more examples

   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.

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

   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.

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