Word.ws English Dictionary

stickmen

stickmen is the plural of stickman.

Meaning of stickman

Noun

stickman (plural stickmen)

  1. A simple drawing of a man with lines to represent limbs and torso.
  2. A dealer in gambling who gathers the dice with a stick.
    • Then, when it was his turn to shoot, he reached out with a completely empty hand and caught the dice the stickman threw to him.1980, John Scarne, Scarne on Dice, page 275
  3. A player in a game played with a stick (such as hockey or lacrosse).
    • With defeats only at the hands of two club teams, the Crescents and the Mount Washington Club, the Orange and Black stickmen have an otherwise unbroken record of victories over Yale, Harvard, Swarthmore, Stevens, Rutgers, and New York University.1924 May 21, The Princeton Alumni Weekly, volume XXIV, number 32, page 702
  4. (US) A person who makes confectionery by pulling candy onto a stick.
    • Stick candy is made by a stick puller or stickman, who pulls the hard candy after it has been boiled; […]1903, United States. Census Office, Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900, number 270, page 1189
  5. (UK, archaic, slang) A pickpocket's accomplice who takes the stolen goods in case the pickpocket is searched.
    • In some cases, when the property is taken from the drunken man, one of the women on some pretext steps to the door and passes it to the “stickman” standing outside, who then makes off with it.1861, Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor; […], volume IV (Those that Will Not Work), London: Griffin, Bohn, and Company, […], →OCLC, page 282
  6. A stick seller, especially of walking sticks.
    • There’s only one stick-man in the streets, as far as I know, I think—that has what you may call a capital in sticks. Only the other day I saw him sell a registered stick near Charing-cross.1851, Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor; […], volume I (The London Street-folk. Book the First.), London: [George Woodfall], →OCLC, page 438

See all 8 meanings of stickman

Questions about stickmen

What is stickmen the plural of?
Stickmen is the plural of stickman.

Words near stickmen in the dictionary

  1. stickling
  2. Stickling Green
  3. sticklings
  4. stickly
  5. stickman
  6. stickmen
  7. Stickney
  8. Stickneys
  9. stickout
  10. stickouts
  11. stickpeople

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: stickmen (page history and authors); stickman (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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Cite this entry: “stickmen.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/stickmen. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.