Word.ws English Dictionary

wheel-barrow men

wheel-barrow men is the plural of wheel-barrow man.

Meaning of wheel-barrow man

Noun

wheel-barrow man (plural wheel-barrow men)

  1. (US, historical) A convict sentenced to hard labor in the 1800s, especially one sentenced to work maintaining the roads.
    • At the outset of the reformatory process in Pennsylvania, it was thought that a salutary effect would result from long continued, visible, or public punishment, by degrading labour in the streets or upon the highways ; ... and many persons, now living, can distinctly remember when convicts...1845, Pennsylvania Journal of Prison Discipline and Philanthropy, page 3
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see wheel-barrow, man.; a man working with a wheel-barrow.

Questions about wheel-barrow men

What is wheel-barrow men the plural of?
Wheel-barrow men is the plural of wheel-barrow man.

Words near wheel-barrow men in the dictionary

  1. wheel window
  2. wheel windows
  3. wheel within a wheel
  4. wheel-barrow
  5. wheel-barrow man
  6. wheel-barrow men
  7. wheel-barrows
  8. wheel-chair
  9. wheel-chairs
  10. wheel-clamp
  11. wheel-clamped

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wheel-barrow men (page history and authors); wheel-barrow man (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: “wheel-barrow men.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wheel-barrow_men. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.