penny-a-liner
Americannoun
noun
Etymology
Origin of penny-a-liner
1825–35; penny-a-line (of writing) paid for at the rate of a penny per line + -er 1
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.
After a few disastrous jobs in the Manhattan jungle, the apprentice author be came a penny-a-liner for the pulps; since then he has banged out 70 novels and some 600 short stories.
From Time Magazine Archive
MacDonald was an old penny-a-liner, with 50 or 60 paperback thunderations behind him, before he began the Travis McGee series more than a decade ago.
From Time Magazine Archive
The Emperor has thrown him up, and there's no one outside a penny-a-liner cares two pinches for him or what becomes of him.
From Hurricane Island by Watson, H. B. Marriott (Henry Brereton Marriott)
Bray the Bavarian Envoy at Vienna; I, the penny-a-liner, being the complement of the party.
From Charles Lever, His Life in His Letters, Vol. II by Downey, Edmund
There was Robin Hood, you know, what draw’d the long-bow a deal better than the worst penny-a-liner as ever mended a quill.
From The Battery and the Boiler Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables by Ballantyne, R. M. (Robert Michael)
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.
