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The Collaborative International Dictionary
Passer-by

Passer-by \Pass`er-by"\, n. One who goes by; a passer.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
passer-by

also passerby, 1560s, from agent noun of pass (v.) + by; earlier, this sense was in passager (see passenger).

Wiktionary
passer-by

alt. A person who is pass by (that is, walking past). n. A person who is pass by (that is, walking past).

WordNet
passer-by
  1. n. a person who passes by casually or by chance [syn: passerby, passer]

  2. [also: passers-by (pl)]

Usage examples of "passer-by".

On the Place he was accosted by the blind man, who, having dragged himself as far as Yonville, in the hope of getting the antiphlogistic pomade, was asking every passer-by where the druggist lived.

Each of them has its panegyrist outside to buttonhole the passer-by and extol the lewd delights within.

Towards the end of the week, and notably on a Saturday, every passer-by is an unshorn brigand capable of the darkest deeds of villany, while twenty-four hours later the land will be found to be peopled by as clean and honest and smart, and withal as handsome, a race of men as any on earth.

I commend it to those of the Anglo-Gallic school, who love the domestically horrible, and delight in unsunned sorrows: but, I throw not any one topic away as a waif, for the casual passer-by to pick up on the highway.

A workman, a currier, named Moulins, who had taken refuge in one of these shot-riddled cellars, saw through the cellar air-hole a passer-by, who had been wounded in the thigh by a bullet, sit down on the pavement with the death rattle in his throat, and lean against a shop.

But Henry Rogers did not see the passer-by in whose delicate mind a point of taste had thus vanquished curiosity, for his thoughts had flown far across the pale-blue sky, behind the cannon-ball clouds, up into that scented space and distance where summer was already winging her radiant way towards the earth.

Catatonic youths dressed as women in gowns of burlap and rotten rags, faces heavily and crudely painted in bright colors over a strata of beatings, arabesques of broken, suppurating scars to the pearly bone, push against the passer-by in silent clinging insistence.

On the 4th of April, 1832, a passer-by mounted the post on the corner which forms the angle of the Rue Sainte-Marguerite and shouted: "I am a Babouvist!

The bedroom windows were always left partly open, to afford a bird's-eye view of numerous little bedsteads with very white dimity furniture, and thereby impress the passer-by with a due sense of the luxuries of the establishment.

He ran the four hundred yards to the house, saw that Andrew Borden was dead, and deputized a passer-by, Charles Sawyer, to stand guard while he went back to the stationhouse for assistance.

Many of his teeth were broken, all were yellow as autumn crocus, and the stench emanating from him, body and bearskin, was enough to strike an unsuspecting passer-by senseless.

Having once realized that it was his wife who was incarcerated in Fort Gayole, was it not natural that he would go and prowl around the prison, and along the avenue on the summit of the southern ramparts, which was accessible to every passer-by?

The neighbour hearkening with white face beside his window, the passer-by arrested by a horrible surmise on the pavement—these could at worst suspect, they could not know.

Several times he got the wheel caught in a drain and had to be helped out by a kindly passer-by, and at one point, when he had to cross a busy street, a policeman held up all the traffic for him.

To any passer-by they were nothing more than a group of patient peasants stretching their legs whilst the driver and ox-boy fed and watered their animals.