Definition:
one belonging to or suited to the lowest moral or economic condition of usually urban civilization : a street urchin
Examples:
"But when the afternoon arrived, his unsuspecting mother found her pretty parlours invaded by twelve little gutter-snipes, not much cleaner as to vocabulary than as to person." – Lucia Runkle, Harper's Magazine, 1873
About the Word:
For many people, guttersnipe conjures up images of a Dickensian waif, some ill-clothed and iller-fed child of the streets, making their way through Victorian London by hook or crook. Which makes sense, in a way, since the works of Charles Dickens are well-populated with guttersnipes.
Dickens, however, seems to have not used the word in any of his writing. There is evidence of the word being used as early as 1824, it initially referred to a pig, and was not in wide use to describe children at the time that Dickens was writing.
