roustabout
roustabout noun: an unskilled laborer, especially at an oilfield, at a circus or on a ship.
Noun
roustabout (plural roustabouts)
- An unskilled laborer, especially at an oilfield, at a circus or on a ship.
- The U. is my own Alma Mater, and I am proud to be known as an alumni, but there are certain instructors there who seem to think we ought to turn the conduct of the nation over to hoboes and roustabouts.1922, Sinclair Lewis, chapter XIV, in Babbitt, New York, N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace and Company, →OCLC
- Then Sísiphos in torment I beheld / being roustabout to a tremendous boulder.1961, Homer, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, Odyssey, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Book Eleven, 668-9
Verb
roustabout (third-person singular simple present roustabouts, present participle roustabouting, simple past and past participle roustabouted)
- To work as a roustabout.
- When Jack is old and weatherbeat, / Too old to roustabout, / In some rum-shop they’ll let him stop, / At eight bells he’s turned out.1896, John Thomas (attributed), “Get Up, Jack! John, Sit Down!”, in John A[very] Lomax, Alan Lomax, editors, American Ballads and Folk Songs, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, published 1934...
- I was due to bust through that cellar door here to-night, so I hurried the rest of the way up the river, roustabouting on a lower coast packet that made a landing for every fisherman that wanted a plug of tobacco.1907, O. Henry [pseudonym; William Sydney Porter], ““Next to Reading Matter””, in Everybody’s Magazine, volume XVII, page 593, column 1
Examples of roustabout in a sentence
- Brooklyn Tony, who had run away from home to be a circus roustabout, became a poster artist and eventually an Abstract Expressionist.1974, Saul Bellow, “Him with His Foot in His Mouth”, in Collected Stories, Penguin, published 2001, page 377:
- She works in McGregor, North Dakota as a roustabout pusher.2013 January 7, Celeste Headlee, NPR, archived from the original on 29 Oct 2015:
Synonyms of roustabout
Forms of roustabout
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | roustabouts |
| alternative form | rouseabout |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | roustabouts |
| present participle | roustabouting |
| past participle | roustabouted |
| past | roustabouted |
Origin of roustabout
From roust + about.
Questions about roustabout
- What does roustabout mean?
- Roustabout means an unskilled laborer, especially at an oilfield, at a circus or on a ship.
- How do you use roustabout in a sentence?
- Brooklyn Tony, who had run away from home to be a circus roustabout, became a poster artist and eventually an Abstract Expressionist.
- What part of speech is roustabout?
- Roustabout can be a noun or a verb.
- What is the plural of roustabout?
- The plural of roustabout is roustabouts.
Words near roustabout in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: roustabout (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Neøn-roustabout.wav.
Cite this entry: “roustabout.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/roustabout. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.