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
- French.
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
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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