Meaning of Billy Barlow | Babel Free

Definitions

A clown who performs in the streets.

UK, obsolete

Examples

“[…] for at an election meeting in East Maitland in 1845 William Lipscomb, the local wit, said of the squatters that 'so far from being wealthy, they had produced more Billy Barlows than any other class'.”

“[…] as Jerry White notes in his history of London in the nineteenth century: There were the clowns or “Billy Barlows”; jugglers, some on stilts, and slack-rope walkers; […]”

CEFR level