MEANING
1. To move about slowly or spend time doing things without a clear purpose.
2. To get or try to get things from other people for free, often by relying on their generosity.
3. A person who relies on others to provide things without paying or giving much in return.
Use it for
portraying aimless wandering; showing time spent without a plan; describing slow browsing around a place; giving a character an unhurried or disengaged mannerDistinguishes purposeless drifting from taking advantage of others’ generosity, with regional noun uses clearly marked. Writing functions: Characterization and aimless movement.
Words that belong together
- mooch around the shops
- mooch about the house
- mooch along the street
On the page
We mooched around the station bookshop until the rain stopped.
He spent the morning mooching about the house, unable to begin the letter.
He arrived just as dinner was served and tried to mooch a meal.
She resented the way he mooched off friends while refusing every offer of paid work.
“I’m not your resident mooch,” he said, putting money beside his plate.
Word forms
- Base
- mooch
- Past tense
- mooched
- Past participle
- mooched
- Present participle
- mooching
Usage notes
Verb: mooch, mooches, mooched, mooched, mooching; future will mooch. Noun: mooch/mooches for a person; a mooch for a period of wandering. Wander sense often mooch around/about; borrowing sense can be mooch something from someone. Register: informal. Commonness: moderately common; senses vary by region (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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