Roaming

How to spell roaming

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce roaming

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does roaming mean?

1. verbMoving or wandering about over a wide area without a fixed route or destination.
2. nounThe use of a mobile phone on a network other than your home provider's, typically while travelling.

Roaming in a sentence

• verb

  The cattle were roaming freely across the open hillside.

• noun

  Data roaming charges can add a small fortune to a holiday phone bill.

• verb

  A pack of stray dogs was roaming through the empty car park at night.

• noun

  She switched off roaming before crossing the border to avoid extra fees.

Where does roaming come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

Roaming is the present participle of the verb 'roam', whose origins are genuinely murky. It appears in Middle English as 'romen', meaning to wander or rove without a fixed destination, and was already in use by the 1300s. A long-standing popular story links it to the medieval pilgrims who travelled to Rome, but most scholars treat that as an appealing coincidence rather than a real source, since the spelling and senses do not line up cleanly. The likeliest explanation is a native Germanic word for wandering that left few written traces before Middle English. In modern times the word picked up a precise technical meaning in mobile telephony, where a phone 'roams' onto a network other than its home one, but the everyday sense of moving freely from place to place is far older and explains the spelling: the long 'o' sound written 'oa', as in 'foam' and 'load'.

How the word is built

• roam (to wander)
• -ing (present participle / gerund suffix)