Meaning of rogues' gallery | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A set of pictures of convicted or suspected criminals used in law enforcement investigations to help witnesses identify suspects.
2. Any group of lawbreakers or other disreputable characters.
   broadly, idiomatic
3. The set of supervillains associated with a particular superhero or comic book title.

Examples

“When the policemen arrest a man . . . if there is good reason to suspect him, they take his picture before they let him go. . . . Then they put the picture up in the rogues' gallery among the others, where everybody who comes there can see it.”

“"Recognize these people?" Dutch asked, pointing to the rogues' gallery. I nodded. "All of 'em. Cutthroats to the man."”

“By 1859, D. Morier Evans was exhibiting [George] Hudson as the principal character in his rogues' gallery entitled "Facts, Failures and Frauds"; and at the hands of modern economic historians he has been written down as a common swindler.”

“The old staple of every demonstration: gully gully may shor hai, Congress Party chor hai—the cry goes up in every alley, Congress Party is a 'rogues' gallery—was very much in evidence.”

“For more than a decade, Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, masterminded a vast, clandestine and hugely profitable enterprise whose mission boiled down to this: selling to a rogues' gallery of nations the technology and equipment to make nuclear weapons.”

CEFR level