Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. An often homeless boy who roams about the streets; an urchin.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A neglected and precociously knowing street-boy; an unruly boy running about at his own will. Also called street Arab.
Wiktionary
- n. A street urchin; a homeless boy.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. A neglected and untrained city boy; a young street Arab.
WordNet 3.0
- n. (sometimes offensive) a homeless boy who has been abandoned and roams the streets
Etymologies
- From French gamin. (Wiktionary)
- French. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“She called the gamin: he was a shrewd monkey-faced fellow, with an insolent crafty eye.”
“i think gamin is only gonna be a benefit if u play these games which are made for school or kids, when u start playin games for 18+ like gta, thats when there are negative effects realityintern”
EXTRALIFE – By Scott Johnson - Computer games ‘do have benefits’
“To sum up the whole, and in one word, the gamin is a being who amuses himself, because he is unhappy.”
“The gamin is a grace to the nation, and at the same time a disease; a disease which must be cured, how?”
“This word gamin was printed for the first time, and reached popular speech through the literary tongue, in 1834.”
“In 1976 Brian Glanville described the young Ray Wilkins (still sometimes known as Butch Wilkins in those days) as a "gamin" figure on his England debut.”
“The water here is so beautifully clear and transparent that one of the amusements of our men was to throw silver coin of the smallest size in the water and see the little boys -- the street "gamin" of the town -- dive for them and bring them up from water fathoms deep before they reached the bottom.”
““How should one stop to listen to the lucubrations of a literary gamin, to the brawling and mouthing of a man whose praise would be as insolent as his slander is impotent, or the irresponsible and irrepressible chatter of the professionally unproductive?””
“In Mamele (1938), a comic melodrama from a play by Meyer Schwartz, Picon, over forty, played Khavtski, an energetic twelve-year-old gamin who cares for her widowed father and six siblings.”
“After witnessing a live performance by the fearless fashion gamin at this spring's Costume Institute ball at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it's accurate to say she works hard for her applause and she earns every bit of it.”
The Washington Post: Lady Gaga's a fashion plate, but it takes more for her to be an icon
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘gamin’.
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phrontistery - g
from phrontistery.info
gabardine, gabbart, gabble, gabbro, gabelle, gabion, gablock, gad, gadarene, gadoid, gadroon, gadzookery and 439 more...
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scoundrels and bastards
already several of these lists, but I wanted my own
varlet, scoundrel, slubberdegullion, bastard, hooligan, boor, churl, thug, cad, ne'er-do-well, miscreant, minx and 85 more...
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Les Misérables
A selection of words from the epic by Victor Hugo
perquisites, dispensations, execrate, spikenard, fireplaace, effeminate foppery, delaine, hoarfrost, lackadaisicalness, ort, geldings, milch and 103 more...
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Words Covered in Faery Dust (G)
words that evoke magic, mystery, mayhem, magnificence or anything else that glimmers in the grass
gable, gaia, gala, galaxy, gallows, gambol, garden, garland, garnet, gauntlet, gazebo, gazelle and 105 more...
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C. S. Bird – Grandiloquent Dictionary
All the words from the Grandiloquent Dictionary.
946 of these 2700 words do not yield any results in six different dictionaries, hence many of them might be misspellings.
More in...abacinate, abcedarian, abderian, ablegate, abligurition, ablutophobia, abnormous, acarophobia, acathasia, accipitrine, accidia, accubitus and 2690 more...
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lanklenmot's Words
ineluctable, prelapsarian, bien pensant, prospero, preternatural, gratifying, iconoclast, cineast, persnickety, tumescent, galvanize, pap and 887 more...
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learning
A list of words whose meanings I am learning, either because a) I don't know the meaning b) I know the meaning, but could stand to better appreciate certain inflections or secondary meanings or c) ...
louche, educe, loam, cob, sclerotic, palliate, axial, syndicalist, ecumenical, sally, fatuous, parvenu and 1381 more...
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MIX DES CULTURES
french words & english ones
des mots français & d'autres anglaisà gogo, tchétchène, faciès, déviant, gamin, superette, grigri, diantre, in jeopardy, syncope, primrose, menthe and 92 more...
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Field Mass
for the same
fanon, armet, wether, filibuster, shadoof, shabrack, mai, sainfoin, sand-crack, panoply, guerdon, flunky and 233 more...
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rememberers
prolix, ageusia, animadversion, anodyne, antic, arabesque, beadle, brachymetropia, colophon, desquamation, diaphoresis, diegesis and 3251 more...
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nether's list
adroit, recrudescent, ecclesiastical, canaille, philologian, ignoble, dilettante, vicegerant, gilt, enfiladed, somnambulism, gamin and 215 more...
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Strumpets, Street People, and Scallywags
Derogatory terms for your classic band of rascals and wenches
minx, bawd, harlot, harridan, rapscallion, scapegrace, scullion, slattern, strumpet, trollop, varlet, wag-halter and 26 more...
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tomladams's Words
demiurge, oneiromancy, mandarinate, hypnoidal, pasigraphic, einfalle, outrine, fumaroles, haruspication, decennial, propinquity, gamin and 45 more...
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rduke's Words
misguggle, ken, sere, etiolated, gelid, digladiate, popinjay, bathykolpian, conglaciation, hyperborean, callipygian, vagile and 1253 more...
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Words Which Caught my Fancy
Just a private list of words which I enjoy (:
schadenfreude, quixotic, serendipity, ennui, loquacious, taciturn, persnickety, zeitgeist, tchotchke, fhqwhgads, moxie, pixie and 40 more...
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Classassin
Class^Warfare$$$$!
arriviste, parvenu, gigmania, dyvoury, thugly, déclassé, stalko, sudden loss of we..., guttersnipe, mesocracy, nouveau riche, bourgeois and 71 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for gamin.
johnmperry feminine is gamine. Jun 20, 2008
yarb His second man teacher was Mr Athens Olympus - by his changeful face a gamin hieratic type or a late Greek deity of Marseilles...
- Louis Zukofsky, Little Jun 20, 2008