Word.ws English Dictionary

mean streets

mean streets noun: a district or set of locales in which there is a high incidence of poverty, crime, disrepair, antisocial behavior, or other adverse conditions.

Noun

mean streets pl (normally plural, singular mean street)

  1. (plural, plural-normally) A district or set of locales in which there is a high incidence of poverty, crime, disrepair, antisocial behavior, or other adverse conditions.
    • Mr Squeers began to thrust his head out of the window every half-minute, and to bawl a variety of directions to the coachman; and after passing, with some difficulty, through several mean streets which the appearance of the houses and the bad state of the road denoted to have been recently built...1838 March – 1839 October, Charles Dickens, chapter 38, in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1839, →OCLC
    • While it is not a city of slums, as some people imagine, it may well be said to be one gigantic slum. From the standpoint of simple decency and clean manhood and womanhood, any mean street, of all its mean streets, is a slum.1903 October, Jack London, chapter 19, in The People of the Abyss, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC

Examples of mean streets in a sentence

  • Expectant dog 'Lucky' lived up to her name when a Blackburn woman came to her rescue after being abandoned on the mean streets of Manchester.1997 August 21, “Lucky to be alive”, in Lancashire Telegraph, UK, retrieved 15 Apr 2022:
  • In the early 1980s,[…] I was a reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer trying to act fearless covering the mean streets of a city with more mean ones than perhaps any in America.2007 March 4, Buzz Bissinger, “Philadelphia Stories”, in New York Times, retrieved 15 Apr 2022:
  • “New York City used to be known for our mean streets, but, going forward, we’re going to be known for our clean streets,” Adams said in June.2023 September 4, Adam Gabbatt, quoting Eric Adams, “‘Rat tours’ boom in rodent-infested New York”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:

Forms of mean streets

singularmean street

Questions about mean streets

What does mean streets mean?
Mean streets means a district or set of locales in which there is a high incidence of poverty, crime, disrepair, antisocial behavior, or other adverse conditions.
How do you use mean streets in a sentence?
Expectant dog 'Lucky' lived up to her name when a Blackburn woman came to her rescue after being abandoned on the mean streets of Manchester.
What part of speech is mean streets?
Mean streets is a noun.

Words near mean streets in the dictionary

  1. mean squares
  2. mean standard
  3. mean standards
  4. mean streak
  5. mean streaks
  6. mean streets
  7. mean sun
  8. mean suns
  9. mean survival time
  10. mean survival times
  11. mean the whole world to

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mean streets (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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