Dictionary

streetling en · NOUN

Etymology

From street + -ling.

Meanings

1. A small, inferior, or minor street.
   • […] and was then received into a magnificent high-backed chair, covered with orange silk, and gay with flags and streamers, on which I was borne on the shoulders of six electors, nodding majestically through all the streets and streetlings; […] 1852, Henry Cockburn, Lord Cockburn, “Life of Lord Jeffrey, Second Article”, in The Dublin University Magazine, volume 39, page 729:
   • The traffic had to flow round by Broad Street, St. Giles; whilst between Broad Street and Great Russell Street is the notorious St. Giles' rookery, of which Church Lane — a miserable streetling, running parallel with and south of New Oxford […] 1868, Charles Bertie P. Bosanquet, London: some account of its growth, charitable agencies and wants, page 39:
2. One who frequents or lives on the streets.
   • Clean face and glossy curls must never frown upon little smutty, streetling publican. 1894, Hubert Marshall Skinner, The schoolmaster in comedy and satire - Page 495:
   • Suddenly I was a demure demoiselle set to scream a second time for help, not the starving streetling I'd become since arriving in Paris six months prior, several weeks shy of my sixteenth birthday. 2012, James Reese, The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll & Mademoiselle Odile - Page 6:
   • This, however, it was impossible in such a bustling thoroughfare to do; a fact which the scrambling and exclamations of the half-dozen streetlings clambering on the outer railings speedily brought home to me. 1888, Catherine Louisa Pirkis, “A House of Shadows”, in Charles Dickens, editor, All the Year Round, volume 42, page 12:

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