Definitions
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A man who cleans out common sewers. or any one who fishes up small articles from the mud on the strands of tidal rivers.
- n. A neglected or deserted child, who is allowed to run and play about the streets, picking up his living and his training anyhow; a street Arab; a gamin.
- n. A kind of pipit
- n. The Australian magpie-lark, Grallina picata, named from its large and elaborately built mud nest.
- n. A mudder (which see).
Examples
“The tide had been at the flood when the book disappeared, and when it ebbed, the offending volume was found by a little mud-lark imbedded in the refuse of the river.”
“All right, my young mud-lark," replied the Captain.”
“He'd have to mud-lark just the same, but he'd have more to eat and no beatings, and he'd always hung to me from the time he was born.”
“Up to five, say, they must be fed and housed somehow, but from five on a boy of any spirit ought to begin a career as mud-lark to graduate from it in time into anything for which this foundation had fitted him.”
“Nothing, however, was settled; and Bill continued to mud-lark, catch fish, run errands, look after boats, and hold gentlemen's horses, till he was getting to be a big lad.”
“Struck up a jilt so gaily O. "_Kim ap_ -- be after sitting fast in the front there, old Mapps, or you'll make a mud-lark of yourself.”
“_mud-lark_; that is, a plunderer of the ships 'cargoes that unload in the Thames.”
“The mud-lark returns home, when his labours are ended, sorts the indiscriminate heterogeneous "mass of matter," and disposes of it as well as he can. "{”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘mud-lark’.
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Learned (or Encountered) in Reading
I have a list for words learned from Newsweek; here's where I keep all the stuff from other shit I read.
Except when I'm looking stuff up and find new words that way. Those go on their...cellie, laminectomy, mridangam, terroir, hypospadias, crus, corpora cavernosa, crura, uretheral meatus, bartholin's gland, coloquintida, colopexy and 921 more...
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reesetee Ooh! You're reading a great book! Let us know what you think. :-) Oct 1, 2008
chained_bear "Beside them fluttered the mud-larks, often children, dressed in tatters and content to scavenge all the waste that the toshers rejected as below their standards: lumps of coal, old wood, scraps of rope."
—Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map (New York: Penguin, 2006), 2 Sep 30, 2008