street urchin
noun
Simple meaning
A child who lives, or spends most of their time, in the streets.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
streeturchuhnSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈstɹiˈtɝtʃən
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
britishdated
A child who lives, or spends most of their time, in the streets; sometimes a petty thief or pickpocket.
Britishdated
A child who spends most of his time in the streets especially in slum areas
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
This meaning: A child who lives, or spends most of their time, in the streets; sometimes a petty thief or pickpocket.
Used this way, street urchin is an older-sounding word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It turns up most in historical writing and literature or storytelling contexts.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Dated
- Connotation
- Old-fashioned
- Usage feel
- Dated in modern speech
Where it naturally appears
- Historical writing
- Literature/storytelling
Usage note
This meaning still makes sense to most readers, but it sounds a generation behind current usage.
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.