How to Use truant in a Sentence

truant

1 of 2 noun
  • Eve had missed enough school days that the city declared her truant.
    — Literary Hub, 21 Jan. 2026
  • Getzlaf was joined by Rickard Rakell as five Flames poured out of the bench to replace the truants.
    — Mark Whicker, Orange County Register, 14 Apr. 2017
  • Hurt was looking for truants and came upon Montgomery, a 17-year-old skipping school.
    — Adam Geller, The Seattle Times, 30 July 2017
  • A lot of kids’ parents don’t have time to sign out their kids, so they would be counted absent instead of truant, Hampton said.
    — Doug Ross, Chicago Tribune, 1 Apr. 2026
  • And under California law, the letter reads, that means his son is considered a truant.
    — Harmeet Kaur, CNN, 22 Oct. 2020
  • In Park Hill School District about 150 students who observed the walkout were marked truant.
    — Mará Rose Williams, kansascity, 20 Mar. 2018

truant

2 of 2 adjective
  • Montgomery was playing hooky from school and Hurt was on truant patrol.
    — R.j. Rico, The Seattle Times, 21 June 2017
  • In the story, Rich and some friends had played truant one afternoon.
    — Junot Díaz, The New Yorker, 17 Apr. 2018
  • The parents or guardians of truant children could face a $2000 fine or up to one year in jail.
    — Alexis Jones, Marie Claire, 16 Aug. 2019
  • Older students kept home could be found truant and forced to surrender their placements.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 12 Oct. 2021
  • Her mother went to the police station and reported her truant.
    — Keith Bierygolick, Cincinnati.com, 7 May 2020
  • Depending on local laws, parents can also face jail time and fines when their children are truant.
    — Samantha M. Shapiro, New York Times, 29 Sep. 2022
  • There’s a scene where the truant middle-schoolers find a brick of white that’ll have parents in the audience clutching their pearls.
    — Craig D. Lindsey, Chron, 23 Feb. 2023
  • That could be a bigger problem if a student already has a lot of those and the extra one results in him or her being considered truant.
    — Doug Criss, Cnn design: Joyce Tseng, CNN, 12 Mar. 2018
  • She was sent to a truant school, but eventually stopped going altogether.
    — Yosha Gunasekera, Marie Claire, 11 May 2018
  • To be sure, the overwhelming majority of truant students do not become school shooters.
    — Dallas News, 23 June 2022
  • Small also said the district recently stopped alerting law enforcement when students are truant.
    — Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica, 17 Sep. 2022
  • The police did not initially investigate it as a crime because the teenager was often truant.
    — Sophie Rebmann, Nadine Schmidt and Judith Vonberg, CNN, 7 June 2018
  • Lawmakers learned recently that the Uvalde shooter was often truant.
    — Dallas News, 11 July 2022
  • One program punished parents of habitually truant school children with severe fines and jail time.
    — Dominick Mastrangelo, Washington Examiner, 13 Aug. 2020
  • Under the law, however, parents could still be held criminally liable for their truant children.
    — Sandra Baker, star-telegram, 8 May 2018
  • The President made good on his threat, fired the truant eleven thousand three hundred and forty-five controllers, and banned them from federal employment for life.
    — Gregory Pardlo, The New Yorker, 12 Feb. 2017
  • Another state law prohibits schools from notifying police when students are truant so officers can ticket them.
    — Jennifer Smith Richards, ProPublica, 28 Apr. 2022
  • Most of the truancy tickets were written after the law banning schools from referring truant students to police for tickets went into effect.
    — Jennifer Smith Richards, ProPublica, 26 May 2022
  • According to the presentation, failure to serve detention, being tardy or truant were the main reasons high school students were served in-school suspensions.
    — Rafael Guerrero, chicagotribune.com, 25 Feb. 2022
  • Claire is honest and lacerating about the pull of prestige, especially for a woman whose coming of age entailed truant punks knocking each other’s teeth out with baseball bats.
    — Katy Waldman, The New Yorker, 28 Oct. 2021
  • Seeing an opening, Harris began sending notices to the families of chronically truant kids.
    — Molly Ball, Time, 3 Oct. 2019
  • Homeless students were more than three times as likely to be truant — having at least 15 unexcused absences in a 90-day period — than their more well-to-do counterparts.
    — Kate Santich, OrlandoSentinel.com, 10 Oct. 2017
  • This is hardly a surprise, given that nearly a quarter of students were truant and that, even as the spring semester ground to an end, only a fifth of school districts expected teachers to provide real-time instruction.
    — Matthew Rice, National Review, 20 Aug. 2020
  • Madani’s work is like a truant love child of scatological transgressions by the late Mike Kelley and the feminist media smarts of artist Barbara Kruger.
    — Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times, 14 Sep. 2022
  • The virus sapped many districts of the personnel to reliably track students who were truant or absent, and the state enrollment census was taken early in the year, during a surge in infections that may have distorted the numbers.
    — New York Times, 17 May 2022
  • School counselors are often called on to martial challenging situations at school — conflicts between teachers and students, truant students and young people who may bring the trauma and grief of a difficult home life through the school’s doors.
    — Moriah Balingit, Washington Post, 16 July 2017
  • Under a law that went into effect in 2019, the Illinois legislature banned schools from referring truant students to police so that they could be ticketed.
    — Jennifer Smith Richards, ProPublica, 26 May 2022
  • The school makes daily phone calls to absent students and frequent home visits — one week last month, school representatives showed up at the residences of 14 students who were truant or needed help with virtual learning.
    — Washington Post, 27 Nov. 2020
  • According to student tweets, the event became a walk-in so students could still participate during their lunch or study hall periods and not be counted as absent or truant, which would affect their ability to attend prom later in the evening.
    — Rafael Guerrero, Elgin Courier-News, 21 Apr. 2018
  • Another law, dating to 2019, directly bans schools from reporting truant students to authorities so the students can be ticketed.
    — Jennifer Smith Richards, Chicago Tribune, 29 Apr. 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'truant.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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