extravagate

Extravagate goes back to medieval Latin extravagari, "to wander outside," built from extra, "outside," and vagari, "to roam." The base verb vagari was current in classical Latin by the 1st century BCE. In Rome, the image was literal movement beyond a path or boundary. The word began with motion before it took on any abstract force.

By the 12th and 13th centuries, church and legal Latin used extravagantes for decretals that lay outside the main canonical collections. Bologna was a major center for that usage around 1200. A text could be extravagans because it stood beyond the received body, not because it was wild in style. The legal sense gave the word a precise institutional life.

English took extravagate in the 16th century from post-classical Latin forms and related learned usage. Writers used it for straying, digressing, or moving beyond proper limits. By 1553, English evidence shows the verb in print with that sense of going outside bounds. Its relatives extravagant and extravagance would become far more common.

The verb itself stayed rare, but it never vanished entirely. In English it has meant to digress in speech, to ramble in action, or to exceed rule and measure. What began as literal wandering became a learned word for mental and rhetorical straying. Its history keeps the old road inside the modern metaphor.