bag lady
Americannoun
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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 • Sep. 21, 2025
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 • Jul. 8, 2025
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 • Jan. 26, 2024
“I thought I would be a bag lady 10 years from now saying, ‘Hey, I invented those,’ ” Ms. Revson told The Post in 1995.
From Washington Post • Sep. 19, 2022
All he’d done was carry a hippie bag lady.
From "The Son of Neptune" by Rick Riordan
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.
