sharpie

From sharp +‎ -ie (“diminutive suffix”).

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈʃɑɹpi/
• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈʃɑːpi/

• Audio (AU)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɑː(ɹ)pi

sharpie (plural sharpies)

1. (colloquial) An alert person.
   • 1988, D. Miller Morgan, A Lovely Night to Kill, page 64:

     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."

   • 2012, Richard W. Munchkin, Gambling Wizards, page 109:

     You have to beat a lot of real sharpies, guys who have been playing for years.

2. (US, regional) A knowledgeable fisherman.
   • 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.

3. (US) A swindler.
   • 1953, Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, Penguin, published 2010, page 102:

     Three booths down a couple of sharpies were selling each other pieces of Twentieth Century Fox, using double arm gestures instead of money.

4. (US) A long, narrow fishing boat used in shallow waters.
   • 1995, Rodney Barfield, Seasoned by Salt: A Historical Album of the Outer Banks, page 168:

     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.

   • 2006, Greg Rössel, The Boatbuilder's Apprentice, page 293:

     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.

5. (birdwatching) Clipping of sharp-shinned hawk.
   • 2005, Bill Thompson, Eirik A. T. Blom, Jeffrey A. Gordon, Identify Yourself: The 50 Most Common Birding Identification Challenges, page 93:

     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.

   • 2010, Era S. VanDenburg, The Natural World of Ivy Lane, page 48:

     My mother had lost a considerable number of spring chicks to a raiding sharpie.

6. (Australia) A member of a violent, fashionably dressed youth gang of the 1960s and 1970s.

   Synonym: sharp

   • 2006, Iain McIntyre, Tomorrow Is Today: Australia in the Psychedelic Era, 1966-1970, page 47:

     The Circle Ballroom in High Street Preston was another popular sharpie hang-out. […] Sharpies were all deep drinkers.

7. A Sharpie or other brand of felt-tipped marker pen.

• Shar Pei, harpies, sephira, shar-pei, spheria