adjective [notbeforenoun]
1 if a boat or a person in a boat is adrift, the boat is not tied to anything or is floating without being controlled by anyone:
The survivors were adrift in a lifeboat for six days.
2 (BrE) (of a person) feeling alone and without a direction or an aim in life:
young people adrift in the big city
3 no longer attached or fixed in the right position:
I nearly suffocated when the pipe on my breathing apparatus came adrift. * (figurative) She had been cut adrift from everything she had known. * (figurative) Our plans had gone badly adrift.
4 ~ (of sb/sth) (BrE) (in sport) behind the score or position of your opponents:
The team are now just six points adrift of the leaders.
IDIOMS
cast / set sb adrift (usually passive) to leave sb to be carried away on a boat that is not being controlled by anyone: (figurative) Without language human beings are cast adrift.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for adrift is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Does adrift appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — adrift appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
