Word.ws English Dictionary

Billy Barlow

Billy Barlow noun: a clown who performs in the streets.

Noun

Billy Barlow (plural Billy Barlows)

  1. (UK, obsolete) A clown who performs in the streets.
    • […] for at an election meeting in East Maitland in 1845 William Lipscomb, the local wit, said of the squatters that 'so far from being wealthy, they had produced more Billy Barlows than any other class'.1960, Bill Wannan, A Treasury of Australian Humour, page 40
    • […] as Jerry White notes in his history of London in the nineteenth century: There were the clowns or “Billy Barlows”; jugglers, some on stilts, and slack-rope walkers; […]2009, Dan Michael Worrall, The Anglo-German Concertina: A Social History, volume 1, page 49

Forms of Billy Barlow

pluralBilly Barlows

Origin of Billy Barlow

Named after a real Billy Barlow, who (according to Hotten; see reference) was a well-known street character around the East End of London, and died in Whitechapel Workhouse.

Questions about Billy Barlow

What does Billy Barlow mean?
Billy Barlow means a clown who performs in the streets.
What part of speech is Billy Barlow?
Billy Barlow is a noun.
What is the plural of Billy Barlow?
The plural of Billy Barlow is Billy Barlows.

Words near Billy Barlow in the dictionary

  1. billstickers
  2. billsticking
  3. Billund
  4. Billups
  5. billy
  6. Billy Barlow
  7. Billy Barlows
  8. Billy Big Balls
  9. Billy Big Bollocks
  10. Billy Bob
  11. Billy bollocks

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Billy Barlow (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “Billy Barlow.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/billy_barlow. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.