wandering to meaning

Definition of 'wander'

Video: pronunciation of wander

wander in British English

Wander in american english, examples of 'wander' in a sentence wander, trends of wander.

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• wand reader
• wander aimlessly
• wander alone
• wander an aisle
• All ENGLISH words that begin with 'W'

Related terms of wander

• eyes wander
• wander plug
• polar wander
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Definition of wanderings noun from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary

• His wanderings took him first to India.

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Look up any word in the dictionary offline, anytime, anywhere with the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary app.

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Synonyms of wandering

• as in rambling
• as in nomadic
• as in roaming
• as in trespassing
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Thesaurus Definition of wandering

 (Entry 1 of 2)

Synonyms & Similar Words

• digressionary
• digressional

Antonyms & Near Antonyms

• straightforward
• undeviating
• peripatetic
• galavanting
• on the move
• gallivanting
• perambulatory

Thesaurus Definition of wandering  (Entry 2 of 2)

• knocking (about)
• gadding (about)
• kicking around
• vagabonding
• milling (about or around)
• trespassing
• transgressing
• breaking the law
• falling from grace
• backsliding

Thesaurus Entries Near wandering

wandering (into)

Cite this Entry

“Wandering.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/wandering. Accessed 26 Apr. 2024.

More from Merriam-Webster on wandering

Nglish: Translation of wandering for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of wandering for Arabic Speakers

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Money Report

Jeff Bezos isn't a fan of ‘time blocking'—here's what he does instead to boost his productivity

By ashton jackson,cnbc • published april 24, 2024 • updated on april 24, 2024 at 2:53 pm.

Jeff Bezos doesn't jam-pack his schedule or set strict time blocks for all his meetings.

Instead, the 60-year-old Amazon and Blue Origin founder — currently the second-richest person in the world, according to Forbes — gives himself and his teams ample time for creative thinking, he told the "Lex Fridman Podcast."

"I don't keep to a strict schedule," Bezos said, in an episode first released in December 2023. "My meetings often go longer than I plan for them to, because I believe in [mind] wandering."

For example, Bezos makes time during meetings for people to bounce ideas off each other, no matter how small or spontaneous, he said — a process he called a "messy meeting." Those sessions usually don't have a set end time, he added.

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"When I sit down [in] a meeting, I don't know how long the meeting is going to take if we're trying to solve a problem," Bezos said. "The reality is we may have to wander for a long time ... I think there's certainly nothing more fun than sitting at a whiteboard with a group of smart people and spit-balling and coming up with new ideas and objections to those ideas, and then solutions to the objections and going back and forth."

He added that "a lot of people feel like wandering is inefficient," but studies show that a divergent mind can actually boost a person's productivity, creativity and happiness.

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Mind wandering vs. time blocking.

Some productivity experts swear by the time blocking method, which involves blocking out specific amounts of time on your calendar for every task you need to accomplish each day — sometimes even including meal breaks and coffee chats.

But the strategy can leave you feeling stressed and burned out , Yale University psychology professor  Laurie Santos told attendees at SXSW in March. Meanwhile, a 2016 study of more than 200 college students found that their creativity significantly improved when allowing their minds to wander.

If you're the kind of person who gets overwhelmed by a packed schedule, carving out time to allow your mind to wander could help you come up with ideas you might not have considered on a more structured schedule — provided you do it effectively rather than simply zoning out, psychologist Jill Suttie wrote for the University of California Berkeley's "Greater Good" magazine in 2018.

When a problem arises in the workplace or at school, take some time that's free from distractions — like your phone or a string of unread emails — and try to come up with an array of solutions, both big and small, then bounce them off of your colleagues to round them out, Suttie wrote. It may sound counterintuitive, but taking a break from your work routine to let your mind wander can sometimes be the most effective way to solve a problem that's otherwise left you feeling stuck.

"Under the right circumstances, a wandering mind may actually benefit us and possibly those around us," Suttie wrote. "The trick is to know when to set your mind free."

Bezos' approach to mind wandering

Bezos lets his mind wander to consider the pros and cons of his own ideas. Once they've survived his own "first level of scrutiny," he presents them to others for a productive group brainstorm to help the idea take shape.

For Bezos, that initial "intuition" is a jumping-off point that can lead to more exploration with other people. The results can be both "fun" and productive, as you work together to take a potential creative solution and figure out how to make it work in reality, he said.

"I will often say, 'Look, it is going to be really easy for you to find objections to this idea, but work with me...'" Bezos told Fridman. "Because it's really easy to kill new ideas in the beginning. So, you need to forewarn people and say, 'I know it's going to take a lot of work to get this to a fully formed idea. Let's get started on that. It'll be fun.'"

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Meaning of wandered in English

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wander verb ( MOVE AROUND )

• walk The baby has just learned to walk.
• stride She strode purposefully up to the desk and demanded to speak to the manager.
• march He marched right in to the office and demanded to see the governor.
• stroll We strolled along the beach.
• wander She wandered from room to room, not sure of what she was looking for.
• amble She ambled down the street, looking in shop windows.
• crawl There'd been a bad accident on the motorway and traffic was crawling.
• trundle Lorries trundle through the narrow lanes.
• creep He crept downstairs, hardly making any noise.
• trudge They trudged wearily through the snow.
• stroll We spent the afternoon strolling around Budapest.
• amble He ambled over to the window.
• Don't worry if you lose hold of the reins - the horse won't wander off.
• He wandered around, clearing up in a desultory way.
• We wandered along the shore , stepping over the flotsam that had washed up in the night .
• We wandered through the beautifully proportioned rooms of the Winter Palace.
• She was wandering around in a daze this morning .
• His eyes wandered over the posters adorning the walls .
• dumbwalking

You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics:

wander verb ( SUBJECT )

• bury the lede idiom
• candy coating
• candy-coated
• circumlocution
• circumlocutory
• gloss over something
• go off on a tangent idiom
• mealy-mouthed
• prevaricate
• unexpressed

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Managing meandering waterways in a changing world

Just as water moves through a river, rivers themselves move across the landscape. They carve valleys and canyons, create floodplains and deltas, and transport sediment from the uplands to the ocean.

A new paper out of UC Santa Barbara presents an account of what drives the migration rates of meandering rivers. The two authors compiled a global dataset of these waterways, analyzing how vegetation and sediment load effect channel movement. “We find a global-scale trend between the amount of sediment that rivers carry and how quickly they’re migrating, across all variables,” said lead author Evan Greenberg , a doctoral student in the Department of Geography.

Their results, published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters , contrast with previous work that emphasized the stabilizing effect of vegetation. In this paper, the researchers highlight how the activity of meandering rivers emerges from the interplay between sediment deposition and bank stabilization by vegetation. Some of the world's most important waterways are meandering rivers, so properly understanding their behavior is crucial to managing these natural phenomena in a changing world.

Two forces, called bar push and bank pull, act on a river bend. Bar push is caused when deposition on the inside of a bend forms a sandbar, which pushes the curve outward. At the same time, erosion on the opposite bank pulls the bend even farther outward. Sediment load has a stronger effect on the former, while the stabilizing presence of vegetation has more influence on the latter.

Scientists have proposed various hypotheses as to which factor exerts a stronger influence on meander migration. “This is a pretty contentious topic and keeps going back and forth,” said senior author Vamsi Ganti , Greenberg’s advisor and an associate professor in the geography department.

To investigate these dynamics, Greenberg and Ganti collated existing measurements of river migration rates and added data from approximately 60 additional rivers. Altogether, they compiled data on 139 meandering rivers across the globe, spanning different regions, climates, sizes and vegetation regimes. The researchers modeled each river channel as a series of line segments using satellite imagery. They could then track how these segments shifted over time to measure the river’s migration.

The leading paradigm was that vegetation slows down this migration by stabilizing the outer bank against erosion. This contrasted with experimental evidence suggesting that sediment load could be an influential factor. Bank pull is stronger in unvegetated rivers, but as Greenberg and Ganti discovered, these tend to have higher sediment supply as well, making it difficult to distinguish the relative contributions of the two processes.

But Greenberg and Ganti’s analysis revealed a clear trend: Migration was faster for rivers that carried a lot of sediment relative to their size. The model also showed vegetation slowing down river migration, as suggested by previous studies. However, the effect was much more modest, with unvegetated rivers migrating four times faster than similar-sized counterparts, rather than the 10-fold increase reported by some of their colleagues. This suggests that bar push has a stronger influence on meandering rivers than bank pull.

That said, river behavior flows from the confluence of the two processes. “You can’t have one dominate the other in a meandering river,” Ganti said. “If you don’t have enough sediment supply, bank pull will outpace bar push, and you’ll end up with a braided river. And so it’s really the balance between the bar push and the bank pull that creates these stable meandering rivers.”

The migrating meanders of the Red River upstream of the Denison Dam on the boarder of Oklahoma and Texas. Credit : Evan Greenberg et al.

Dams provide a ready-made case study for investigating the contributions of these two mechanisms, since the structures trap sediment but scarcely affect vegetation. When the authors looked at the movement of three North American rivers above and below notable dams, they found that migration rates slowed downstream, where the river was starved of sediment. They could now be certain that sediment load was driving bend migration.

Greenberg is further investigating the effect dams have not just on meandering rivers, but on all the types of rivers that have floodplains. “We want to know what dams are doing to the migration of rivers,” he said.

Many of the world’s most important waterways are meandering rivers, and hundreds of millions of people live along their floodplains, Ganti said. “So knowing how rivers move is important for managing the risks that come with bank migration.

Vamsi Ganti

Vamsi Ganti's research seeks to quantify and understand the mechanics of physical processes that shape the landscapes on Earth and other planets, and to unravel the expression of these processes in the ancient sedimentary record.

In previous papers, Ganti has documented how sea-level rise and changes in sediment supply could affect river dynamics in the future. The results paint a picture of more active, less predictable rivers, especially when combined with more extreme weather and changing land use. For instance, scientists predict that many rivers will see increased sediment supply. “More sediment means that rivers can do more stuff,” he remarked.

Ganti plans to broaden the scope of their model. While geographers and Earth scientists have historically focused on meandering rivers, the majority of the planet’s waterways are wandering, multi-threaded rivers, he said. He and Greenberg are working on quantifying river mobility in general, across the many categories of rivers. Ideally, they want to develop a model that can describe a river’s migration as it changes type along the entirety of its length, from headwater to sea.

Harrison Tasoff Science Writer (805) 893-7220 [email protected]

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About UC Santa Barbara

The University of California, Santa Barbara is a leading research institution that also provides a comprehensive liberal arts learning experience. Our academic community of faculty, students, and staff is characterized by a culture of interdisciplinary collaboration that is responsive to the needs of our multicultural and global society. All of this takes place within a living and learning environment like no other, as we draw inspiration from the beauty and resources of our extraordinary location at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

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