Definitions
Wiktionary
- n. slang A pig; pork.
- n. One who scavenges in river or harbor mud for items of value, especially in London during the Industrial Revolution. Also applies to a person scavenging sewers. A person that begs near a river. (rare) A sewer cleaner. (rare)
- n. A child who spends most of their time in the streets especially in slum areas. A child who plays in the mud. Any dirty or unkempt person.
- n. Nickname for a soldier of the Royal Engineers.
- n. Assorted birds that are found in muddy places or build their nests with mud. Especially Anthus petrosus and Alauda arvensis.
- n. Australian The Grallina cyanoleuca that builds its nest with mud into a bowl like shape.
- n. A racing horse that performs well on muddy or wet tracks.
Etymologies
- From mud + lark. (Wiktionary)
Examples
“It was found by a mudlark – one of the small army of amateur archaeologists who scour the beaches and mudflats of the river at low tide.”
“You wade along in this way step by step, like a mudlark at Portsmouth”
“With the aid of a mudlark -- a mere barge boy, who probably had no more right on the barge than Jules himself -- Racksole had won his game.”
“There is at least one powerful bond, though it may not always awake sympathy, between mudlark and monarch -- that of hunger.”
“I now became a regular mudlark, though I got employment when I could by running on errands and in assisting the boatmen on the river.”
“All our talk of the middle class these days is fine, but Dickens knew the higher and the lower, the much lower: the mudlark, the wasting orphan, the prison child, the crossing sweeper, the dun, the dustman, the shabby clerk, the street philosopher.”
“Carlisle 2.50 Ultra-competitive stuff but the mudlark”
“A noted mudlark, Purple is unbeaten from two attempts on heavy tracks, and has recorded three wins and a placing from five starts on slow ground.”
“Deteriorating conditions are not a concern for mudlark”
“The mudlark won the Welsh National at Chepstow in December but was forced to miss the Cheltenham Festival with a slight setback, leaving connections to target the three-mile-five contest.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘mudlark’.
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birds
birds with singular names from
at least 9 English dictionariesaasvogel, aberdevine, accentor, accipiter, aepyornis, agami, albatross, alcatras, alcid, alcidine, amadavat, amokura and 1056 more...
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Perdido Street Station
Words that I had to look up, from the Weird Fiction book Perdido Street Station by China Miéville.
mudlark, psoriatic, morbific, prophylactic, desultory, banyan, detumescing, chitinous, thaumaturge, aerostat, prestidigitation, mumming and 1 more...
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Stalking Darkness
Words and phrases from Lynn Flewelling's book, Stalking Darkness.
inquest, halyard, catamount, occlude, founder, more, grouse, grapple, water butt, antepenultimate, palimpsest, hob and 196 more...
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sionnach's Words
contumely, fomite, holmgang, poltroon, eleemosynary, obsidian, nugatory, grindcore, felch, recrudescent, pyx, parenteral and 3271 more...
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Defunct professions
Economists like to cite "buggy whip maker" as an example of a profession whose career prospects were dimmed, and ultimately quenched, by the inexorable march of technological progress. This is a li...
buggy whip maker, guillemot egg col..., bog iron hunter, nettle string maker, fuller, purple maker, tanner, gut girl, reddleman, wont catcher, navvy, ratcatcher and 239 more...
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Papageno's Words, Pt. I
hobbledehoy, absquatulate, chthonic, prolix, ululate, internecine, verisimilitude, animadversion, concupiscence, vertiginous, cucullate, lucubrate and 1554 more...
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Oofy
States of being
seeress, honey bucket, donkeyman, poopyhead, halfwit, vixenish, galoot, hoity toity, shitkicker, miserabilist, wanker, clueless and 261 more...
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Still More Bird Wirds
A work in progress....Birds from around the world (other than endemic to North America).
barbet, hornbill, trogon, bee-eater, bristlehead, wren-babbler, stubtail, blackeye, bush warbler, cassowary, bowerbird, bird-of-paradise and 722 more...
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Words from "The Ghost Map"
"The Ghost Map", by steven Johnson, is a fascinating account of the (successful) investigation by two men, John Snow and Henry Whitehead, into the means by which cholera is transmitted, following t...
ghost map, epidemiology, dot map, voronoi diagram, index case, cholera, experimentum crucis, vibrio cholerae, microbe, germ theory, public health, animalcula and 61 more...
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ill-bred
gaucherie, rusticity, rowdyism, scoundrel, blackguard, ruffianism, mauvais plaisanterie, frippery, geegaw, fump, frump, ribald and 30 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for mudlark.
reesetee Positively Dickensian. Aug 28, 2009
yarb I wonder how you get an official mudlark's permit. I bet they're nigh on impossible to obtain, the product of a byzantine process, masonic ties, hereditary debts and murkly kinships. Aug 27, 2009
chained_bear That's a really cool story. Thanks for posting! I thought I remembered this word from The Ghost Map, and apparently (sionnach's list at right) I did. :) Aug 27, 2009
gangerh HaHa! What a load of mudlarkey. Aug 27, 2009
yarb "The ball and chain was found in a Rotherhithe barge bed by an official mudlark – there are many amateurs but only a few have permits to actually dig in the Thames foreshore – called Steve Brooker. "I almost left it there to be honest because for three weeks in a row I'd had cannonball after cannonball and this looked like another one," he said."
- Mystery over ball and chain found in Thames, Guardian.co.uk, 26-8-9. Aug 27, 2009