stringer
Americannoun
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stringers
plural
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a person or thing that strings.
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a long horizontal timber connecting upright posts.
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Architecture. string.
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Civil Engineering. a longitudinal bridge girder for supporting part of a deck or railroad track between bents or piers.
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a longitudinal reinforcement in the fuselage or wing of an airplane.
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Also called string correspondent. Journalism. a part-time newspaper correspondent covering a local area for a paper published elsewhere.
The Los Angeles paper has a correspondent in San Francisco but only a stringer in Seattle.
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a stout string, rope, etc., strung through the gills and mouth of newly caught fish, so that they may be carried or put back in the water to keep them alive or fresh.
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a contestant, player, or other person ranked according to skill or accomplishment (used in combination).
Most of the conductors at the opera house were third-stringers.
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Mining. a small vein or seam of ore, coal, etc.
noun
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architect
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a long horizontal beam that is used for structural purposes
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another name for stringboard
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nautical a longitudinal structural brace for strengthening the hull of a vessel
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a journalist retained by a newspaper or news service on a part-time basis to cover a particular town or area
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of stringer
late Middle English word dating back to 1375–1425; see origin at string, -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.
See Examples For:
“Make it staff,” Faas said—meaning a member of AP, not a lowly stringer.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 27, 2025
Dominoes fall quickly and hard for 33-year-old budding reporter Sara Byrne, assigned as a freelance stringer by the fictional London Tribune to cover the 2012 Gaza War.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 7, 2025
As a high school junior, he signed on as a stringer, feeding varsity wrestling and hockey results to the paper’s sports department.
From New York Times ● Jan. 12, 2024
The findings by the Pentagon's inspector general said US officials in Washington DC and Europe had failed to properly account for thousands of weapons, including stringer launchers and air defence missiles.
From BBC ● Jan. 11, 2024
Besides working at the foundry, he was a young stringer for the Atlanta Constitution Tri-Weekly.
From "Cold Sassy Tree" by Olive Ann Burns
RFA laid off its stringers in Myanmar a day before a devastating March earthquake.
From Barron's ● Oct. 29, 2025
The Associated Press also has local Palestinian stringers, and my review of its hundreds of stories on the war this year revealed a total of two deeply reported pieces on Hamas—neither datelined from Gaza.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 15, 2025
The Associated Press, one of several companies that does this type of real-time vote reporting, sends thousands of local stringers to county election offices on election night to call in raw vote count totals.
From Seattle Times ● Oct. 26, 2022
St. John Bosco has so many defensive backs that the second stringers could start for any team.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 17, 2022
The Preacher pulled the biggest two bass and the biggest perch off the stringers and said, “This perch is ten years old, and these bass are one year old each. How many years is that?”
From "Elijah of Buxton" by Christopher Paul Curtis
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.
