These words refer to a person who has no fixed home and who moves sporadically from place to place for short or indefinite stays. Wanderer stresses movement from place to place: aspects of social welfare that are difficult to apply to drovers and other wanderers. Drifter , by contrast, stresses the aimlessness of such movement. A wanderer might have definite reasons for his movements; a drifter , by implication, has none ?or at least no very compelling ones. Furthermore, while a wanderer might be part of a group and move about with it, drifter introduces an implication of solitary movement: There were signs that a drifter had built his campfire there, stayed a day or two, and then moved on. The word is rare in this sense, but is used to describe an aimless person: a drifter who never seemed to stay long in one job.

Nomad , and fugitive both carry suggestions as to the reason for the homelessness or restlessness in question. Nomad , most strictly, refers to one of a group that moves about together for hunting or trading or in accord with the seasons: Asiatic nomads who brought strange cultural artifacts with them into Europe; nomads who take their herds into the mountains during the summer. In less restricted use, nomad may refer to anyone who moves frequently for any reason: the phenomenon of some surfers as sporting nomads moving from beach to beach in search of a good wave. Fugitive suggests secretive movement to escape capture: detectives who traced the trail of the fugitive through three cities.

Itinerant suggests constant movement involving short stays at different places ?"here today and gone tomorrow": Because of his job, the shearer led the life of a veritable itinerant . Tramp specifically suggests a lone man with no monetary resources who floats about the country, living off odd jobs and hand-outs: the grizzled old tramp in tattered clothes who knocked on the screen door and asked if he could chop some wood in exchange for his breakfast. Sundowner and swagman are two surviving Australian terms for those who, in earlier, colonial days and in bad times, found it necessary to move from place to place. The words are almost interchangeable now, but to many the swagman is the itinerant prepared to work and the sundowner one who arrives at sundown when it is too late for a job but time for a hand-out: The swagman is welcome when things are busy around the station: a sundowner hoping for a good meal from the farmer’s wife.

Vagrant may be a more formal term for a person of no fixed abode, but this meaning is sometimes obscured by the fact that the word can also be a legal catch-all for a person committing any of a number of minor offences completely unrelated to sporadic movement from place to place. Vagrancy is a common charge against people who have no visible means of support, for example, a dollar or two on their person. Sometimes vagrant can suggest someone who wanders in search of work: vagrants who went from farm to farm and worked wherever casual hands were needed. Vagabond , when it is not used interchangeably with vagrant, suggests a lazy, cheerful drifter: heavily romanticized portraits of gipsy vagabonds .