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Chinaman

nounattested in dialogue

  • Australia//ˈt͡ʃɑenəmən//
  • //ˈt͡ʃaɪnəmən//
  • /[ˈt͡ʃʰaɪ̯nəmɪ̽n]/
  • //ˈt͡ʃainaman//

A sailing ship of the 18th and 19th centuries engaged in the Old China Trade.

noun

  1. 1

    datedA Chinese person, or person of Chinese descent.

    A disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a lazy one does not exist. So long as a Chinaman has strength to use his hands he needs no support from anybody; white men often complain of want of work, but a Chinaman offers no such complaint; he always manages to find something to do.[…]Any white man can swear a Chinaman’s life away in the courts, but no Chinaman can testify against a white man.

    Another favorite pastime of the Highbinder who is usually a loafer, is to levy blackmail on a wealthy Chinaman.[…]If it were not that the Chinamen kill only men of their own race and let alone all other men, the citizens of San Francisco would have sacked and burned Chinatown.

    On the flat behind the mill, dawn-rising Chinamen shogged with nimble bare feet under their yoke-linked watering-cans. These busy brethren, meeting sometimes on the same narrow track, would pause, ant-like, seemingly to dumbly regard one another and their burdens, then, still ant-like, pass silently to their work.

    "It is my fly-trap!" shrieked the Chinaman. "And I am the god of destruction!"

  2. 2

    A sailing ship of the 18th and 19th centuries engaged in the Old China Trade.

  3. 3

    obsoleteAddiction from a narcotic, especially heroin.

    Chinaman half in and half out of the door. Codeine and goof balls, and complete discouragement.

Etymology

From Chinese Pidgin English. Calque of Chinese 中國人 /中国人 (Zhōngguórén) ("China + -man"). Applied also to ships by analogy with East Indiaman.

Forms

plural
Chinamen
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).