- arrant
- arrant: [16] Arrant is an alteration of errant, as in knight errant. This originally meant ‘roaming, wandering’, but its persistent application to nouns with negative connotations, such as rogue and thief, gradually drove its meaning downwards by association, to ‘notorious’.
=> errant - arrant (adj.)
- late 14c., variant of errant (q.v.); at first merely derogatory, "wandering, vagrant;" then (1540s) acquiring a meaning "thoroughgoing, downright, notorious."