bootlegger

[boot-leg-er]

noun

1. a person who makes or sells liquor or other goods illegally.

   A bootlegger named George Cassiday secretly supplied members of Congress with liquor during Prohibition.

   The sort of criminals of interest to the piracy commission are large-scale DVD bootleggers, not individual downloaders.

Word History and Origins

Origin of bootlegger¹

bootleg ( def. ) + -er ¹

Example Sentences

“Sinners,” set in 1932, stars Michael B. Jordan in a dual performance as twin bootleggers Smoke and Stack, who return from Chicago to their Mississippi home to open a juke joint.

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Bootlegging attracts youngsters seeking easy money, and the jails are overflowing with small-time bootleggers unable to afford bail, leaving their families behind without breadwinners.

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Like bootleggers and Baptists both benefiting from blue laws, the extreme left and extreme right need each other to justify their catastrophizing.

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“He was born into a family of bootleggers and gamblers and they outsmarted and out-hustled everyone,” Brown biographer James Richardson once wrote.

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Those without access in the past have purchased liquor from bootleggers or brewed their own inside their homes.

Read more on Seattle Times