navvy
Example Sentences
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The effect wasn’t androgynous so much as deeply disconcerting: Priest was, in writer Julie Burchill’s memorable assessment, “built like a hod-carrier” and looked “like a navvy who’d stolen all your makeup”.
From The Guardian ● Jun. 5, 2020
They were known as the East London Group, and among their ranks were humble office clerks, a navvy, a window cleaner, a shop assistant, a printer, a basket-weaver and an errand boy.
From BBC ● Sep. 23, 2017
He is also likened to a navvy, a sweep, a stiff Dutch doll, and an immense feather mattress.
From The Guardian ● Aug. 24, 2012
He once said, and allowed no secret to be made of it, that he would "rather talk to an intelligent navvy than to a dull duke."
From Time Magazine Archive
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A navvy could have given him points in daintiness.
From The Shadow of the Past by F.E. Mills Young
They helped build the C&O Canal and worked as navvies, or laborers, in its port.
From Washington Post ● Mar. 4, 2020
Prof Rotherham said it may have originally arrived with Welsh "navvies digging out the cuttings for the canal systems".
From BBC ● Sep. 1, 2018
To build the Paris-Rouen-Le Havre line in 1841-7, they “imported” not only an engineer, but also thousands of British navvies, miners, bricklayers and mechanics.
From Time ● Oct. 26, 2016
And Dan gave us a great segment about the thousands of navvies who worked like beasts and lived in mud huts.
From The Guardian ● Jan. 19, 2013
Four hundred navvies were at once set to work to form a dam of many thousands of sacks filled with earth.
From Norfolk Annals A Chronological Record of Remarkable Events in the Nineteeth Century, Vol. 2 by Charles Mackie