BEACHCOMBER • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Beachcomber

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noun

beachcomber n. (Written also beach-comber or beach comber) (Naut.)

A vagrant seaman, usually of low character, who loiters about seaports, particularly on the shores and islands of the Pacific Ocean. "I was fortunate enough, however, to forgather with a Scotchman who was a beach-comber."

A vagrant living on a beach.

A person who searches along a beach for objects of value, such as lost objects or seashells.

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Etymology of 'Beachcomber'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Beachcomber" Quotes from Famous Books

... in the crew Cleigh had begun to dislike intensely, and he had been manoeuvring ever since Honolulu to find a legitimate excuse to give the man his papers. Something about the fellow suggested covert insolence; he had the air of a beachcomber who had unexpectedly fallen into a soft berth, and it had gone to his head. He had been standing watch at the ladder head, and against positive orders he had permitted a visitor to pass him. To Cleigh this was the handle he had been hunting ...

— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath

... in the people who had suffered from it, it aroused nothing more than a sort of amused exasperation? He was really impossible. His lot evidently should have been a half-starved, mysterious, but by no means tragic existence as a mild-eyed, inoffensive beachcomber on the fringe of native life. There are occasions when the irony of fate, which some people profess to discover in the working out of our lives, wears the aspect of ...

— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad

Words linked to "Beachcomber" : drifter, vagabond