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Pronunciation varies by accent · noun
(UK, Ireland) A person who harvests periwinkles (a kind of sea snail) to be eaten..
[The girl] informed me that […] I had no right to wander at will upon the winkle-beds! Her brother, said she, was the watcher over this particular part of the Whitstable fishing-ground, beyond which he was the champion winkle-picker of the neighbourhood!
The most inveterate beachcomber and by far the speediest winkle picker in the village was ‘Euan, the son of Euan, the son of Euan’, the Gaelic pronunciation of whose name approximated to a long drawn-out yawn.
the first piece of writing he had ever done [was] a starkly rhymed description of his boyhood as a winkle-picker on the Welsh coast
Annie-John, the winkle picker, in men’s boots and a man’s overcoat went by with an empty bucket.
“Anyway, she can’t have got much pleasure out of him. If it’s owt like the rest of him she’d need a winkle-picker to find it.”
A few years ago she made the mistake of ordering fruit de mer at a restaurant there. The plate was covered five deep in shellfish. The dastardly waiter had maliciously omitted to supply a winkle-picker.
Get yourself a pin or a winkle picker, hoik them out [of their shells], dunk them in the shallot vinegar.
’[…] Clever bugger. He’s got us nice and tight in here. It’ll take a winkle-picker to get us out.’
Use winkle-picker when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.
Winkle-picker means (UK, Ireland) A person who harvests periwinkles (a kind of sea snail) to be eaten..
Common synonyms include winkle pin, roach stomper.
The opposite depends on the specific sense.
[The girl] informed me that […] I had no right to wander at will upon the winkle-beds! Her brother, said she, was the watcher over this particular part of the Whitstable fishing-ground, beyond which he was the champion winkle-picker of the neighbourhood!
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