Word.ws English Dictionary

crossing-sweeper

crossing-sweeper noun: someone whose job is to sweep street crossings.

Noun

crossing-sweeper (plural crossing-sweepers)

  1. (historical) Someone whose job is to sweep street crossings.
    • There was one giant — a black 'un — as left his carawan some year ago and took to carrying coach-bills about London, making himself as cheap as crossing-sweepers.1840 April – 1841 November, Charles Dickens, “Chapter the Nineteenth”, in The Old Curiosity Shop. A Tale. […], volume I, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1841, →OCLC
    • But the streets were also a place of work: for the humble crossing-sweeper, for example, who tried to ensure, in return for a tip, that when persons of quality crossed the road they did so without having to pick their way through dust, mud and horse dung.2012, Simon Heffer, “In Fagin's Footsteps”, in Literary Review, section 403

Forms of crossing-sweeper

pluralcrossing-sweepers

Questions about crossing-sweeper

What does crossing-sweeper mean?
Crossing-sweeper means someone whose job is to sweep street crossings.
What part of speech is crossing-sweeper?
Crossing-sweeper is a noun.
What is the plural of crossing-sweeper?
The plural of crossing-sweeper is crossing-sweepers.

Words near crossing-sweeper in the dictionary

  1. crossing time
  2. crossing times
  3. crossing up
  4. crossing wires
  5. crossing-out
  6. crossing-sweeper
  7. crossing-sweepers
  8. crossings
  9. crossings-out
  10. crossinhibition
  11. crossinhibitory

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: crossing-sweeper (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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