flaneur
noun
fla·neur flä-ˈnər 
variants or less commonly flâneur
: an idle man-about-town
Example Sentences
Recent Examples on the Web Some visitors, happily aware that there’s a flaneur’s funhouse—the visual onslaught of SoHo—just beyond the doors of the Drawing Center, will be primed to experience the show as one more twist in the contemporary spectacle. 
Jed Perl, The New York Review of Books, 3 Aug. 2022 Being a flaneur suggests also a freedom—to roam, to go in whichever direction one chooses, unencumbered by the authorities. Anandi Mishra, The Atlantic, 30 July 2022 In its narrowest definition, a flaneur is simply someone who wanders. Anandi Mishra, The Atlantic, 30 July 2022 The flaneur was a familiar figure in nineteenth-century Paris: a solitary, quasi-artistic man (though not always) who strolled the streets like an urban epicure. Julian Barnes, The New York Review of Books, 27 Apr. 2022 In my conception, to visit Wikipedia was to be a flaneur, wandering unharmed from interesting edifice to interesting edifice. Noam Cohen, Wired, 4 Jan. 2021 How a Person Became a User — which imagines the lurker as a kind of twenty-first century flaneur — Adrian Daub writes that now, in the Age of the Virus, many of us, the inessential us, have become real-life lurkers. Dana Snitzky, Longreads, 14 Apr. 2020 Just as the nineteenth-century flaneur gets intoxicated on a strange mix of empathy and detachment, the lurker sees their historic moment by being above it and very much ensconced in it. Adrian Daub, The New Republic, 13 Apr. 2020 But there are still ways to be on the move, whether it’s Parisians, who can be flaneurs on their city streets again, or Americans, who are taking to their backyards for campouts. Susan Seubert, National Geographic, 13 May 2020 See More
Jed Perl, The New York Review of Books, 3 Aug. 2022 Being a flaneur suggests also a freedom—to roam, to go in whichever direction one chooses, unencumbered by the authorities. Anandi Mishra, The Atlantic, 30 July 2022 In its narrowest definition, a flaneur is simply someone who wanders. Anandi Mishra, The Atlantic, 30 July 2022 The flaneur was a familiar figure in nineteenth-century Paris: a solitary, quasi-artistic man (though not always) who strolled the streets like an urban epicure. Julian Barnes, The New York Review of Books, 27 Apr. 2022 In my conception, to visit Wikipedia was to be a flaneur, wandering unharmed from interesting edifice to interesting edifice. Noam Cohen, Wired, 4 Jan. 2021 How a Person Became a User — which imagines the lurker as a kind of twenty-first century flaneur — Adrian Daub writes that now, in the Age of the Virus, many of us, the inessential us, have become real-life lurkers. Dana Snitzky, Longreads, 14 Apr. 2020 Just as the nineteenth-century flaneur gets intoxicated on a strange mix of empathy and detachment, the lurker sees their historic moment by being above it and very much ensconced in it. Adrian Daub, The New Republic, 13 Apr. 2020 But there are still ways to be on the move, whether it’s Parisians, who can be flaneurs on their city streets again, or Americans, who are taking to their backyards for campouts. Susan Seubert, National Geographic, 13 May 2020 See More Word History
Etymology
French flâneur
First Known Use
1854, in the meaning defined above