mooch

verb

1. (British, colloquial)To wander around aimlessly, often causing irritation to others.

   “Near-synonyms: loiter, roam”

   “These chaps that mooch about, as Hyde was doing, pick up all sorts of odds and ends. He may have pinched them from a chemist’s shop.”

   “You have to be alone to mooch about properly. Other people will just get in the way and be all energetic about things. So wait until they've gone, make a cup of tea and then let the mooching commence.”

   “With 79 minutes gone, the most celebrated team of the modern age had been reduced to bunch of mooching, stumbling yellow-shirted spectators.”

   “A handful of camera crews mooched around the entrance to the Giorgio Cini foundation, where a pair of tight-lipped but polite individuals sat before monitors under a gazebo and politely fended off requests for information.”

2. (colloquial)To beg, cadge, or sponge; to exploit or take advantage of others for personal gain.

   “I managed to mooch my way up the journalistic ladder to the next, more impressive level of “Interviewer”.”

   “Mr. Prince responded on Twitter: “Phony fraud photographers keep mooching me. Why? I changed the game,” he wrote on Wednesday. His Instagram account, which previously had over 70,000 followers, is currently disabled.”

3. (British, colloquial, transitive)To steal or filch.

   “I'm tired of driving you all over and sick of you living in my house, mooching my food.”

noun

1. (UK, colloquial)An aimless stroll.

   “Jack wouldn't be arriving for another ten minutes, so I had a mooch around the garden.”

   “At the secondary school where I normally work as a librarian, I take key workers’ and other children on a “nature mooch”. We undull our senses.”

2. (colloquial)One who mooches; a moocher.

   “"No! I'm sick of you being a mooch, bumming off me all the time! I'm going to London for a few days."”

3. (US, colloquial, humorous, slang)Synonym of Scaramucci (“unit of time”).

   “If we take Scaramucci’s 10-day figure to be the standard of measurement — one “mooch” — then Pruitt survived an amazing 50.3 mooches, even while enduring more than a dozen scandals, any one of which would have doomed a lesser man.”

   “Scaramucci, who jokingly measures time in mooches, a unit equal to approximately 11 days, said he doesn’t necessarily like the version of himself he often sees on screen, but feels director Andrew J. Moscato was accurate.”

   “I understand it's her job. But I would point out to people that Stephanie has lasted way more “Mooches” than me.”

det

1. (alt-of, colloquial, pronunciation-spelling)Pronunciation spelling of much