Word.ws English Dictionary

street-smart

street-smart adjective: having practical rather than theoretical knowledge, like that learned on the streets rather than in the classroom.

Adjective

street-smart (comparative street-smarter, superlative street-smartest)

  1. Having practical rather than theoretical knowledge, like that learned on the streets rather than in the classroom.
    • im street smarter than him yo
    • For Liverpool, it capped six days of desperate disappointment after missing out on the Premier League to Manchester City by a single point then losing to this experienced, street-smart Real team.2022 May 28, Phil McCulty, “Liverpool 0-1 Real Madrid”, in BBC Sport

Forms of street-smart

comparativestreet-smarter
superlativestreet-smartest

Origin of street-smart

Back-formation from street smarts.

Questions about street-smart

What does street-smart mean?
Street-smart means having practical rather than theoretical knowledge, like that learned on the streets rather than in the classroom.
What part of speech is street-smart?
Street-smart is an adjective.

Words near street-smart in the dictionary

  1. street-legal
  2. street-light
  3. street-lights
  4. street-shitter
  5. street-shitters
  6. street-smart
  7. street-smarter
  8. street-smartest
  9. street-sweeper
  10. street-sweepers
  11. street-wise

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: street-smart (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: “street-smart.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/street-smart. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.