nightman
English
Noun
nightman (plural nightmen)
- (historical) A person whose job is cleaning cesspools or sewers, or emptying privies by night.
- 1722, Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, London: E. Nutt (etc.), p. 54,
- 1825, Robert Mudie, London and Londoners; or, A Second Judgment of “Babylon the Great”, London: H. Colburn, 2nd edition, 1836, p. 197,
- Still [the rats] are an organized race, and can combine together for the purposes both of attack and defence; as the nightmen who clean the sewers and cesspools of Babylon often find. The travels of a nightman have never been published; but they would make a very curious book. As they worm their way along those dismal passages, they often find an army of rats drawn up to oppose their farther progress […]
- 1851, Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, London: G. Woodfall & Son, Volume II, The Street-Folk, p. 193,
- I have met with nightmen who have told me that there was “nothing particular” in the smell of the cesspools they were emptying; they “hardly perceived it.” One man said, “Why, it’s like the sort of stuff I’ve smelt in them ladies’ smelling-bottles.”
- A male night shift worker.
- 1907 April 5, The Railroad Gazette, volume 42, number 14, page 482:
- Most men who are of sufficient intelligence and moral character to make thoroughly satisfactory block signalmen will naturally seek a respite occasionally from such a confining routine, and if they cannot accomplish this without securing a substitute at their own expense they are under constant temptation to “change off”—the day man working for the nightman and the nightman for the day.
- A nightwatchman; a guard who works at night.
Synonyms
- (person who cleans cesspools): gong farmer (obsolete)
References
- “nightman”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
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