MEANING
1. A person who searches a beach for useful, valuable, or interesting objects washed ashore.
2. An older term for a non-Indigenous drifter living on a tropical island, especially in the South Pacific.
Use it for
describing someone collecting washed-up objects; naming a searcher for shells and driftwood; portraying close attention to shoreline findsDistinguishes searching a shore for washed-up finds from an older colonial-era label. Writing functions: Shore searching / Historical island drifter.
Words that belong together
- a beachcomber’s finds
- an early-morning beachcomber
- beachcombers searching the shore
On the page
The beachcomber found a glass float tangled in kelp.
At low tide, beachcombers followed the line of yesterday’s storm debris.
The nineteenth-century memoir describes the foreign drifter as a beachcomber.
In that colonial account, beachcomber means an island drifter rather than a collector of shells.
Word forms
- Base
- beachcomber
Usage notes
Countable noun: beachcomber, beachcombers. Related verb beachcomb is not counted separately. Register: neutral. Commonness: moderately common; historical drifter sense dated (dictionary-informed qualitative editorial estimate; not a measured frequency).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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