Winkle-picker
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A person who harvests periwinkles (a kind of sea snail) to be eaten. Ireland, UK
"[The girl] informed me that […] I had no right to wander at will upon the winkle-beds! Her brother, said she, was the watcher over this particular part of the Whitstable fishing-ground, beyond which he was the champion winkle-picker of the neighbourhood!"
- 2 An implement used to extract the flesh of a periwinkle from its shell.
"“Anyway, she can’t have got much pleasure out of him. If it’s owt like the rest of him she’d need a winkle-picker to find it.”"
- 3 A style of boot or shoe with a severely pointed toe, fashionable in the 1950s and 1960s. also, attributive
"winkle-picker toes; winkle-picker stilettos"
Example
More examples"[The girl] informed me that […] I had no right to wander at will upon the winkle-beds! Her brother, said she, was the watcher over this particular part of the Whitstable fishing-ground, beyond which he was the champion winkle-picker of the neighbourhood!"
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.