Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun One who took part in the 1849 California gold rush.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun One of the adventurers, chiefly from the United States, who went to California in search of fortune soon after the discovery of gold there in 1848. The greater number of them arrived in 1849; hence the name.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun Colloq., U. S. One the miners who took part in the California gold rush in 1849; an argonaut.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A miner who took part in the California gold rush of 1849

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a miner who took part in the California gold rush in 1849

Etymologies

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Examples

  • For example, in "Das Rheingold," which begins the cycle and sets up the struggle between gods and dwarves for control of the Ring, the dwarf Alberich is a forty-niner who steals the gold from the Rhinemaidens in a pristine American West.

    Ring Around the Obvious Heidi Waleson 2011

  • The Fed's a whiz, providing, like a forty-niner, the gold for fools it stores inside a Fort Knox vault, with all the tools that help us to delay default, which defies all common sense because we know they tell us lies about how much we're going to owe, and how much our children and grandchildren must pay when the clutch. arrives and we are dead as dust.

    Gershon Hepner: In Fed We Trust 2009

  • It ran along a coastal barrier the other side of Biscayne Bay from young Miami — in 1868 when Henry Lum, a California 'forty-niner, first glimpsed the island from a schooner, you may be certain it was jungle, cocoanut palms on the sand, mangrove swamp and palmetto thicket ten feet off the beach.

    Archive 2007-11-01 Matthew Guerrieri 2007

  • It ran along a coastal barrier the other side of Biscayne Bay from young Miami — in 1868 when Henry Lum, a California 'forty-niner, first glimpsed the island from a schooner, you may be certain it was jungle, cocoanut palms on the sand, mangrove swamp and palmetto thicket ten feet off the beach.

    Southpaw Grammar Matthew Guerrieri 2007

  • In a cavern in a canyon, excavating for a mine, dwelt a miner, forty-niner, and his daughter Clementine.

    Fall On Your Knees Macdonald Ann-Marie 1996

  • In a cavern in a canyon, excavating for a mine, dwelt a miner, forty-niner, and his daughter Clementine.

    Fall On Your Knees Macdonald Ann-Marie 1996

  • He has been seventeen years on the Pacific side of the continent, came out as a "forty-niner," has travelled a great deal, and taken notes of all he has seen, and said he thought of making use of them some time, if his employments would ever admit of it.

    Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California Caroline C. Leighton

  • "He wasn't exactly a forty-niner," I acknowledged.

    The Lure of San Francisco A Romance Amid Old Landmarks Mabel Thayer Gray

  • A forty-niner's a forty-niner, and a man that came in fifty -- well, he might as well have come in sixty or seventy, or even in the twentieth century.

    The Lure of San Francisco A Romance Amid Old Landmarks Mabel Thayer Gray

  • Was it the spirit of some poor forty-niner come back again?

    The Transformation of Job A Tale of the High Sierras Frederick Vining Fisher

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    October 8, 2010