Word.ws English Dictionary

gandy dancer

gandy dancer noun: a railway laborer, especially a member of a crew which carries rails and affixes them to ties.

Noun

gandy dancer (plural gandy dancers)

  1. (US, idiomatic) A railway laborer, especially a member of a crew which carries rails and affixes them to ties.
    • Gandy dancer—A section hand or track laborer.1929, Vernon W. Saul, “The Vocabulary of Bums”, in American Speech, volume 4, number 5, page 340
    • The oddest gandy-dancer on the railroads in Manitoba during the summer of 1926 was a 6-ft. 4-in. American medical student named Ben Spock.1959 May 18, “Bush Teachers”, in Time, retrieved 14 Sep 2008

Forms of gandy dancer

pluralgandy dancers
alternative formgandy-dancer

Origin of gandy dancer

Uncertain; see Wikipedia for various speculative etymologies.

Questions about gandy dancer

What does gandy dancer mean?
Gandy dancer means a railway laborer, especially a member of a crew which carries rails and affixes them to ties.
What part of speech is gandy dancer?
Gandy dancer is a noun.
What is the plural of gandy dancer?
The plural of gandy dancer is gandy dancers.

Words near gandy dancer in the dictionary

  1. gandums
  2. gandurah
  3. gandurahs
  4. gandus
  5. Gandy
  6. gandy dancer
  7. gandy dancers
  8. gandy-dancer
  9. gandy-dancers
  10. Gandys
  11. Gandzha

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gandy dancer (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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