roustabout

English

Alternative forms

• rouseabout

Etymology

From roust +‎ about.

Noun

roustabout (plural roustabouts)

1. (chiefly US) An unskilled laborer, especially at an oilfield, at a circus or on a ship. [from 19th c.]
   • 1922, Sinclair Lewis, chapter 14, in Babbitt, New York, N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace and Company, →OCLC:

     The U. is my own Alma Mater, and I am proud to be known as an alumni, but there are certain instructors there who seem to think we ought to turn the conduct of the nation over to hoboes and roustabouts.

   • 1961, Homer, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, Odyssey, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Book Eleven, 668-9:

     Then Sísiphos in torment I beheld / being roustabout to a tremendous boulder.

   • 1974, Saul Bellow, “Him with His Foot in His Mouth”, in Collected Stories, Penguin, published 2001, page 377:

     Brooklyn Tony, who had run away from home to be a circus roustabout, became a poster artist and eventually an Abstract Expressionist.

   • 2013 January 7, Celeste Headlee, NPR‎^[1], archived from the original on 29 October 2015:

     She works in McGregor, North Dakota as a roustabout pusher. That means she and her crew help fix and maintain the drilling sites.

   • See also quotations under rouseabout.

Synonyms

• rouser
• rousie
• rouster

Translations

an unskilled laborer

• Bulgarian: общ работник m (obšt rabotnik)
• German: Hilfsarbeiter (de) m
• Hungarian: segédmunkás (hu)
• Polish: wyrobnik (pl) m, portowiec (pl) m
• Romanian: ziler (ro) m, zileră (ro) f, salahor (ro) m
• Spanish: jornalero (es) m

Verb

roustabout (third-person singular simple present roustabouts, present participle roustabouting, simple past and past participle roustabouted)

1. (intransitive) To work as a roustabout.
   • 1896, John Thomas (attributed), “Get Up, Jack! John, Sit Down!”, in John A[very] Lomax, Alan Lomax, editors, American Ballads and Folk Songs, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, published 1934, printed 1967, page 494:

     When Jack is old and weatherbeat, / Too old to roustabout, / In some rum-shop they’ll let him stop, / At eight bells he’s turned out.

   • 1907, O. Henry [pseudonym; William Sydney Porter], ““Next to Reading Matter””, in Everybody’s Magazine, volume XVII, page 593, column 1:

     I was due to bust through that cellar door here to-night, so I hurried the rest of the way up the river, roustabouting on a lower coast packet that made a landing for every fisherman that wanted a plug of tobacco.

   • 1932 March 19, Vincent Wall, “Poor Whites”, in Saturday Review of Literature; reprinted in Scott MacDonald, Critical Essays on Erskine Caldwell, Boston, Mass.: G.K. Hall & Co., 1981, →ISBN, page 9:

     Thereafter, the youth gives many years to aimless wandering about the South and the Middle West. He roustabouts with a carnival […]

Further reading

• roustabout on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

Anagrams

• tourabouts