deadbeat

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   informal, disparaging: a lazy or irresponsible person who avoids work or depends on others for support

   Huck exposed the two frauds as regular deadbeats.

2. 2
   noun

   a person who fails to pay debts or meet financial obligations

   The landlord refused to rent another room to the known deadbeat.

3. 3
   adj

   engineering: designed so that a pointer settles immediately without oscillating

   The technician checked the reading on the deadbeat galvanometer.

From dead + beat. Nineteenth-century US slang applied dead beat first to exhaustion and then to a worthless, irresponsible, or defaulting person. The technical adjective independently uses dead for the immediate stopping of a pointer.

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