knock-about

Noun

knockabout (plural knockabouts)

1. Clothing suitable for rough use.
2. A worker habitually engaged in casual employment.
   • We'd had a couple of knockabouts to help with the cooking and stockyard work. They were paid by the job. They were to stay at the camp for a week, to burn the gunyahs, knock down the yard, and blind the track as much as they could.1889, Rolf Boldrewood, Robbery under Arms: A Story of Life and Adventure in the Bush and …, volume 1, page 122
3. A person living in rough, violent conditions.
   • They denounced the peasant's passions as animal lusts and complained that vagabonds and knockabouts were "generally given to horrible uncleanness. They have not particular w1ves, neither do they range themselves into families, but consort together as beasts.1983, Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth Century England, page 91
4. A tumbler.
5. A slapstick comedian or comedy.
6. A small sailboat lacking a bowsprit, of a type found primarily in the Massachusetts area.
   • We sailed our knockabout around Cape Cod.

See all 9 meanings of knockabout