stringer
Americannoun
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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
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.
She previously covered corporate governance and financial regulation as an intern reporter at Bloomberg Law and reported on crime as a metro stringer at the New York Times.
From The Wall Street Journal • Jan. 30, 2026
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
Chandrakar used to also work as a "stringer" for news organisations, where his job involved providing outstation journalists with information about a story or sometimes, even chaperoning them through Maoist strongholds.
From BBC • Jan. 8, 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
He pulled the largest fish off the stringer and held it in one hand with its white belly facing up.
From "Mississippi Trial, 1955" by Chris Crowe
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.
