bag lady
Americannoun
-
Slang: Offensive. an unsheltered or homeless woman who lives and sleeps on city streets or in public places, often keeping all her belongings with her in shopping bags.
noun
Etymology
Origin of bag lady
First recorded in 1960–65
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
"People called us the bag lady because I used to carry all my bags everywhere."
From BBC
Anne Meara was the talk of the town in the role of a bag lady who spurned the self-congratulatory charity of guilty swells.
From Los Angeles Times
Ms. Komar said: “That she was seen as some kind of bag lady, that her art gets overshadowed by those stories, makes us angry.”
From New York Times
The play is filled with outlandish characters — most conspicuously, Trudy, the bag lady, who has lost her mind and in the process has made contact with space aliens curious about higher consciousness on Earth.
From Los Angeles Times
I explained that before “homeless person,” a lot of people used the terms “bag lady” or “bum.”
From Washington Post
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
