Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. One who makes a living scavenging rags and other refuse.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. One who goes about to collect rags, bones, and other waste articles of some little value, from streets, ashpits, dunghills, etc.
- n. A machine for tearing and pulling to shreds rags, yarns, hosiery, old carpet, and other waste, to reduce them to cotton or wool staple; a shoddy-machine.
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. One who gets a living by picking up rags and refuse things in the streets.
WordNet 3.0
- n. an unskilled person who picks up rags from trash cans and public dumps as a means of livelihood
Examples
“Possible death mask of Shakespeare found in ragpicker’s shop.”
“The ragpicker's basket is the hyphen between rags and paper, and the ragpicker is the hyphen between the beggar and the philosopher.”
“Since then, his wife, a ragpicker, found two other broken models as she scoured the garbage dump, and he paid to have them repaired.”
The Huffington Post: India: Toilets Are Scarce, And Highly Desirable
“The hair of their heads and faces grew long and shaggy, while their garments would have disgusted a ragpicker.”
“Floods in Orissa, a ragpicker on a beach, celebrations for the Prime Minister's birthday and more.”
“Left, a ragpicker walked through garbage in search of recyclable material at a municipal waste dump near the eastern Indian city of Siliguri.”
“But what if the artist were to involve the locals, auction off the works and donate the proceeds back to the ragpicker community?”
The Huffington Post: 'Waste Land,' Documentary on Brooklyn Artist and Rio's Garbage Pickers (VIDEO)
“And what he told them will make you safer, because you look more like a thirteen-year-old ragpicker than a fifteen-year-old nobleman.”
“Since the appropriated voice of the king's subject is clearly that of the ragpicker, who in playing the part of the beneficent king "swears solemnly that he will make his people happy," the entire passage becomes a different kind of dramatization of "the wine talking.”
Economies of Excess in Brillat-Savarin, Balzac, and Baudelaire
“Baudelaire's initial call for the "equal treatment" of wine seeks to reverse the condition of neglect to which it is consigned in the Physiology of Taste, a condition it shares with the ragpicker-king of "Le Vin des chiffoniers," obviously, but also with Hoffman and”
Economies of Excess in Brillat-Savarin, Balzac, and Baudelaire
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘ragpicker’.
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Interesting words
A list of words that are odd or words that I have looked up.
concupiscence, brize, scree, scoria, forestaff, spanaemia, valetudinarianism, distasture, pyrethrum, laudanum, gentian, bicameral and 11250 more...
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wunderkammer's Words
smarmy, bubkes, elucidate, togs, aeolian, carp, kibosh, bosky, ramshackle, mange, harpy, effervesce and 163 more...
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the big list
all my wordies
hemiversary, taswegian, beausage, chantepleure, skycandy, hacksilver, shanger, drama pawn, hostage-bride, serpopard, fanwank, lapin and 90 more...
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mccaff's Words
schadenfreude, defenestration, monogamous, epipsychidion, chintz, befall, brouhaha, shenanigans, hooligans, lambasted, servitude, portcullis and 113 more...
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EN - funny (single) words
"Fornication" is not equal to "formication".
Words with funny meaning, spelling or both.barratry, bastinado, bezonian, bibcock, bibliobibuli, biffy, bodewash, boeotian, boondoggle, borborygmic, bosky, brobdingnagian and 729 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for ragpicker.
ruzuzu From the examples:
“The ragpicker's basket is the hyphen between rags and paper, and the ragpicker is the hyphen between the beggar and the philosopher.”
--The Memoirs of Victor Hugo
May 7, 2012
reesetee Closest I have is "Bad Guys." Sep 2, 2008
mollusque You mean like bindlestiff, magpie, vulture, scrounger, clochard? Nope. No lists here. Sep 2, 2008
bilby Thinking out loud, do we have any bums, tramps and scavengers lists? Sep 2, 2008