What is another word for swimming or floating?

Another word for swimming or floating depends on whether you emphasize the active movement or the passive drifting. For swimming as active movement through water, synonyms include bathing, wading, paddling, stroking, diving, treading water, doing laps, snorkeling, and gliding through water. More literary terms include aquaplaning or navigating water. For floating as passive suspension on water, synonyms include bobbing, drifting, bobbing along, buoying, being buoyant, wafting, and being adrift. If you want a word that covers both swimming and floating together, you could use aquatics, waterborne, afloat, buoyant, or simply in the water. Poetic alternatives include gliding, sailing, coasting, or drifting. In a figurative sense, both swimming and floating can suggest being surrounded or overwhelmed, like swimming in paperwork, and similar phrases include immersed, submerged, engulfed, or adrift. The best replacement depends on energy: swimming implies effort and propulsion, while floating implies rest and suspension, so choose active words like paddling for swimming and passive words like bobbing or drifting for floating.