navvy

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

It was said that he ate peas with his knife, that he was illiterate, that he dressed like a navvy, that his wife was "an old frump."

From Time Magazine Archive

But happily that kind of criticism is soon forgotten whose principle is, like that of Mr. Punch's navvy, “Here’s a stranger, let’s ’eave ’alf a brick at him.”

From The Cabinet Minister A farce in four acts by Sir Arthur Wing Pinero

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

I'm not advocating navvies but maybe we need a touch of 19th-century confidence.

From The Guardian ● Mar. 6, 2011

The digging of trenches and the making of fortifications were assigned to navvies, bricklayers, platelayers, and agricultural labourers, large bodies of whom were under railway gangers, and were ready to perform any excavation work.

From The Invasion by William Le Queux