Word.ws English Dictionary

winklepicker

winklepicker is the alternative form of winkle-picker.

Meaning of winkle-picker

Noun

winkle-picker (plural winkle-pickers)

  1. (Ireland, UK) A person who harvests periwinkles (a kind of sea snail) to be eaten.
    • [The girl] informed me that […] I had no right to wander at will upon the winkle-beds! Her brother, said she, was the watcher over this particular part of the Whitstable fishing-ground, beyond which he was the champion winkle-picker of the neighbourhood!1908, W. Percival Westell, chapter 6, in The Story of the Sea and the Seashore, London: Robert Culley, page 199
  2. An implement used to extract the flesh of a periwinkle from its shell.
    • “Anyway, she can’t have got much pleasure out of him. If it’s owt like the rest of him she’d need a winkle-picker to find it.”1982, Pat Barker, chapter 5, in Union Street, New York: Ballantine, published 1983, page 183
    Synonyms:
    winkle pin
  3. (also, attributive) A style of boot or shoe with a severely pointed toe, fashionable in the 1950s and 1960s.
    • winkle-picker toes; winkle-picker stilettos
    Synonyms:
    roach stomper

Forms of winklepicker

pluralwinklepickers

Questions about winklepicker

What is winklepicker the alternative form of?
Winklepicker is the alternative form of winkle-picker.

Words near winklepicker in the dictionary

  1. winkled
  2. winkled out
  3. Winkleigh
  4. Winkleman
  5. Winklemans
  6. winklepicker
  7. winklepickers
  8. winkler
  9. Winkler bottle
  10. Winkler bottles
  11. Winkler County

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: winklepicker (page history and authors); winkle-picker (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: “winklepicker.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/winklepicker. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.