To traipse is to walk, but with a complaint built into the word. It carries the feeling that the walking is long, tiring, aimless, or something you did not want to do — you dragged yourself around. If you say "I traipsed all over town looking for that book", the listener hears the tired feet and the wasted afternoon; "I walked all over town" says none of that. There are two shapes it usually takes. One is walking a long way with effort and often for nothing: traipsing round the shops, traipsing up and down stairs, traipsing across a field in the rain. The other is walking somewhere you had no business walking, casually and annoyingly, which is why parents say things like "don't traipse mud through my kitchen" — there the complaint is about you, not from you. It is followed by a place phrase almost every time (traipse around, through, up, over, all the way to), and it is informal, more common in British than American speech, and more often heard from older speakers. It sounds slightly old-fashioned and a bit funny, which is part of why people enjoy it. There is a rare noun traipse for such a walk, but you will hardly ever meet it. Say it "trayps", rhyming with grapes — the spelling does not help at all.

拖著腳步走來走去、走得又累又白費力氣；也指沒必要地在別人地方走來走去。近似「跑東跑西」加上「累得半死」的抱怨語氣。