The verb to drift means to move slowly and smoothly without control or direction, carried along by wind, water, or current. A boat with no motor running drifts across a lake, pushed wherever the breeze takes it. Clouds drift across the sky. In winter, snow drifts into piles against fences and buildings, blown by the wind into deep mounds called snowdrifts.

People can drift too, in a more abstract sense. When your attention drifts during a long lecture, your mind wanders away from the lesson without you quite meaning for it to happen. Friends sometimes drift apart over the years, slowly losing touch without any big argument or reason.

The word captures a particular kind of movement: gradual, gentle, and unguided. A leaf doesn't rush downstream, it drifts. You don't march away from a conversation, you drift toward the snack table. There's something almost dreamy about drifting, a sense of moving without effort or intention.

As a noun, a drift is something that has drifted, or the slow, gentle movement itself. A snowdrift is a pile of windblown snow.

In racing, drifting describes a skilled driving technique where a car slides sideways through turns, its back wheels losing traction in a controlled way. This specialized meaning is nearly opposite to the word's usual sense of aimless floating, since race car drifting requires tremendous precision and control.