streetling

English

Etymology

From street +‎ -ling.

Noun

streetling (plural streetlings)

1. A small, inferior, or minor street.
   • 1852, Henry Cockburn, “Life of Lord Jeffrey, Second Article”, in The Dublin University Magazine, volume 39, page 729:

     […] and was then received into a magnificent high-backed chair, covered with orange silk, and gay with flags and streamers, on which I was borne on the shoulders of six electors, nodding majestically through all the streets and streetlings; […]

   • 1868, Charles Bertie P. Bosanquet, London: some account of its growth, charitable agencies and wants, page 39:

     The traffic had to flow round by Broad Street, St. Giles; whilst between Broad Street and Great Russell Street is the notorious St. Giles' rookery, of which Church Lane — a miserable streetling, running parallel with and south of New Oxford […]

2. One who frequents or lives on the streets.
   • 1888, Catherine Louisa Pirkis, “A House of Shadows”, in Charles Dickens, editor, All the Year Round, volume 42, page 12:

     This, however, it was impossible in such a bustling thoroughfare to do; a fact which the scrambling and exclamations of the half-dozen streetlings clambering on the outer railings speedily brought home to me.

   • 1894, Hubert Marshall Skinner, The schoolmaster in comedy and satire - Page 495:

     Clean face and glossy curls must never frown upon little smutty, streetling publican.

   • 2012, James Reese, The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll & Mademoiselle Odile - Page 6:

     Suddenly I was a demure demoiselle set to scream a second time for help, not the starving streetling I'd become since arriving in Paris six months prior, several weeks shy of my sixteenth birthday.

Anagrams

• letterings, resettling