Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The Australian magpie-lark, Grallina picata, named from its large and elaborately built mud nest.
  • noun A mudder (which see).
  • noun A man who cleans out common sewers. or any one who fishes up small articles from the mud on the strands of tidal rivers.
  • noun 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.
  • noun A kind of pipit

Etymologies

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Examples

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  • "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

    October 1, 2008

  • Ooh! You're reading a great book! Let us know what you think. :-)

    October 1, 2008