sharpie
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˈʃɑɹpi/
ipa: /ˈʃɑːpi/
rhymes: -ɑː(ɹ)pi
Forms: form: sharpies
Etymology: From sharp + -ie (“diminutive suffix”).
Senses: examples: text: Eunice Marshall asked in a bored tone, "Are you, by any chance, selling magazines?"
Daisy grinned childishly, enjoying Eunice's mistake. "You're quite a sharpie, aren't you, ma'am? You figured me out a whole lot faster than most people do."
ref: 1988, D. Miller Morgan, A Lovely Night to Kill, page 64:
text: You have to beat a lot of real sharpies, guys who have been playing for years.
ref: 2012, Richard W. Munchkin, Gambling Wizards, page 109:
glosses: An alert person.
examples: 1976 December, Ken Schultz, Field & Stream Fishing Contest Winners: Nothing but the Best, Field & Stream, page 78,
Eventually DeBlasio became a sharpie.
In New York and New Jersey coastal fishing parlance a “sharpie” is one who fishes seven days a week all summer long, selling his fish to the market to make a living. Sharpies supposedly have fishing down to a science, to such a degree that they only go to particular places, at particular times, using particular fishing methods, and come back with a boatload of fish while everyone else wonders in amazement.
glosses: A knowledgeable fisherman.
examples: text: Three booths down a couple of sharpies were selling each other pieces of Twentieth Century Fox, using double arm gestures instead of money.
ref: 1953, Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, Penguin, published 2010, page 102:
glosses: A swindler.
examples: text: He brought this pair of sharpies, the Lucia and the Ella, to Beaufort by schooner and began to use them for fishing, oyster dredging, and even as a passenger ferry and party boat.
The sharpie is a flat-bottomed, shallow-draft vessel of moderate size, comparable to a sloop or schooner.
ref: 1995, Rodney Barfield, Seasoned by Salt: A Historical Album of the Outer Banks, page 168:
text: On the other end of the spectrum are the flat-bottomed sharpies. The earliest sharpies were developed in the mid-nineteenth century as the ideal boats for the oyster fishery of the Connecticut shore.
ref: 2006, Greg Rössel, The Boatbuilder's Apprentice, page 293:
glosses: A long, narrow fishing boat used in shallow waters.
examples: text: It is harder to gauge the shorter tail of sharpies, but on sitting birds the tail shape is a more useful character than it is on flying birds. Sharpies of all ages and sexes almost always show a notched tail when they are sitting.
ref: 2005, Bill Thompson, Eirik A. T. Blom, Jeffrey A. Gordon, Identify Yourself: The 50 Most Common Birding Identification Challenges, page 93:
text: My mother had lost a considerable number of spring chicks to a raiding sharpie.
ref: 2010, Era S. VanDenburg, The Natural World of Ivy Lane, page 48:
topics: biology
birdwatching
natural-sciences
ornithology
glosses: Clipping of sharp-shinned hawk.
examples: text: The bird looked of a similar character to a knot/pec sandpiper/sharpie, but the exact size was difficult to judge[.]
ref: 2009 August 26, Rewi, “Help me Identify a Wader please”, in Birding NZ, archived from the original on 01 Jan 2025:
text: I went back into my photos, and yes, on 13 Nov, I photographed both Sharpie and the Pec.
ref: 2019 November 21, Stan Jarzynski, “Possible Pectoral Sandpiper”, in canberrabirds mailing list:
topics: biology
birdwatching
natural-sciences
ornithology
glosses: Clipping of sharp-tailed sandpiper.
examples: text: The Circle Ballroom in High Street Preston was another popular sharpie hang-out.[…]Sharpies were all deep drinkers.
ref: 2006, Iain McIntyre, Tomorrow Is Today: Australia in the Psychedelic Era, 1966-1970, page 47:
synonyms: sharp
glosses: A member of a violent, fashionably dressed youth gang of the 1960s and 1970s.
glosses: A Sharpie or other brand of felt-tipped marker pen.