What is "breadline"

Usage examples of "breadline".

I made her circulation manager, put her in charge of handing out the paper at factory gates and along breadlines and so on.

They were sacked en masse at the beginning of the long vacation and hired in the autumn, after a summer of breadlines and doss houses.

They'd had food coupons, breadlines, fuel shortages, and inflation higher than the World Trade Center.

You don't think those benefits that Trish gives are breadlines do you?

English novelist, a French film director who wore clothes so elegantly it made everyone else feel like breadline standbys, a plasma physicist from Princeton who's up for the Nobel this year because of his major breakthrough in magnetic containment fusion.

It seemed brutal to be wading into the bill of fare with poor old Bicky headed for the breadline.

Marilee wrote long descriptions of breadlines for all the people who had been put out of work by the Depression, and of men in nice suits who obviously used to have money, but who were now selling apples on street corners, and of a legless man on a sort of skateboard, who was a World War One veteran or was pretending to be one, selling pencils in Grand Central Station, and of high-society people thrilled to be hobnobbing with gangsters in speakeasies -- that sort of thing.

I drew him aside and whispered how I'd had some sport with the Bugleboy, who didn't know an imaginary reference line from a breadline.