Noun

(en noun)

A person who stinks.

(slang) A contemptible person.

* I won't date Mary Jane again. I thought she was a stinker to leave before the end of the movie.

* {{quote-book

, year=1960 , author= , title=(Jeeves in the Offing) , section=chapter II , passage=Never be a stinker , because if you are, though you may flourish for a time like a green bay tree, sooner or later retribution will overtake you.}}

(slang) Something difficult (e.g. a given puzzle) or unpleasant (e.g. negative review, nasty letter).

* Today's crossword is a stinker .

* {{quote-book

, year=1960 , author= , title=(Jeeves in the Offing) , section=chapter V , passage=I number several authors among my aquaintance [...] and they invariably become all of a doodah when they read a stinker in the press about their latest effort.}}

* {{quote-book

, year=1960 , author= , title=(Jeeves in the Offing) , section=chapter X , passage=I sat there seething with fury. And after I had seethed for a bit I rose from my chair, took pen in hand and wrote Bobbie a stinker'. [...] I accused her in set terms of giving me the heave-ho in order that she could mercenarily marry a richer man. I called her a carrot-topped Jezebel whom I was thankful to have got out of my hair. I... Oh, I can't remember what else I said but, as I say, it was a ' stinker .}}

(slang) Something of poor quality.

* April 19 2002 , Scott Tobias, AV Club Dark Tide [http://www.avclub.com/articles/dark-tide,72548/]

The barely-released stinker Dark Tide continues Stockwell’s fetishistic pattern, coming alive whenever it’s paddling among the sharks off the South African coast and settling in for a long snooze once it gets back on the boat or reaches dry land.

Any of several species of large Antarctic petrels which feed on blubber and carrion and have an offensive odour, such as the giant fulmar.

A chemist.

Noun

(en noun)

A toiler; a labourer.

*1845 , Thomas Ignatius M. Forster, Richard Gough, Epistolarium :

Ye are twin swinkers in this nether field One to prolong, the other to expand, My landmark and my clock; but both must yield, To the destroying angel's flaming wand, [...]

*1891 , Harper's magazine - Volume 83 - Page 786:

Tosspots and swinkers' were they then; tosspots and ' swinkers are they still.

*2010 , Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries :

[...] whether they were quizzed by "those idle gallants who haunt taverns, gay and handsome," or hobnobbed with "travellers and tinkers, sweaters and swinkers ," the alehouse was assuredly no place for nuns.

(Chaucer)