Meaning of Knockabout | Babel Free

Definitions

1. Clothing suitable for rough use.
2. A worker habitually engaged in casual employment.
3. A person living in rough, violent conditions.
4. A tumbler.
5. A slapstick comedian or comedy.
6. A small sailboat lacking a bowsprit, of a type found primarily in the Massachusetts area.
7. An act of playing a sport casually or informally.
   informal

Equivalents

Examples

“We'd had a couple of knockabouts to help with the cooking and stockyard work. They were paid by the job. They were to stay at the camp for a week, to burn the gunyahs, knock down the yard, and blind the track as much as they could.”

“It will prevent these shops from keeping these girls and using them as messengers or "knockabouts" for twelve months, and then discharging them and getting another batch in their place, which is sometimes done”

“From what she knew, they were humble people on both sides, farmers and handymen and knockabouts who followed the crops and their best chances state to state. Some worked in the quarries. Some worked in the mills.”

“They denounced the peasant's passions as animal lusts and complained that vagabonds and knockabouts were "generally given to horrible uncleanness. They have not particular w1ves, neither do they range themselves into families, but consort together as beasts.”

“The guests were mostly reformed drunks and knockabouts who wanted to talk about their troubled trek through life”

“The Virginia assembly in 1670 disfranchised most of the landless knockabouts, accusing them of “having little interest in the country” and causing “tumults at the election to the disturbance of his majesty's peace.””

“We sailed our knockabout around Cape Cod.”

“The kids had a knockabout with a football in the backyard.”

CEFR level