sharpie

1. (colloquial) An alert person.Examples: "Eunice Marshall asked in a bored tone, "Are you, by any chance, selling magazines?" Daisy grinned childishly, enjoying Eunice's mistake. "You're quite a sharpie, aren't you, ma'am? You figured me out a whole lot faster than most people do.""; "You have to beat a lot of real sharpies, guys who have been playing for years."colloquial

2. (US, regional) A knowledgeable fisherman.Examples: "1976 December, Ken Schultz, Field & Stream Fishing Contest Winners: Nothing but the Best, Field & Stream, page 78, Eventually DeBlasio became a sharpie. In New York and New Jersey coastal fishing parlance a “sharpie” is one who fishes seven days a week all summer long, selling his fish to the market to make a living. Sharpies supposedly have fishing down to a science, to such a degree that they only go to particular places, at particular times, using particular fishing methods, and come back with a boatload of fish while everyone else wonders in amazement."USregional

3. (US) A swindler.Examples: "Three booths down a couple of sharpies were selling each other pieces of Twentieth Century Fox, using double arm gestures instead of money."US

4. (US) A long, narrow fishing boat used in shallow waters.Examples: "He brought this pair of sharpies, the Lucia and the Ella, to Beaufort by schooner and began to use them for fishing, oyster dredging, and even as a passenger ferry and party boat. The sharpie is a flat-bottomed, shallow-draft vessel of moderate size, comparable to a sloop or schooner."; "On the other end of the spectrum are the flat-bottomed sharpies. The earliest sharpies were developed in the mid-nineteenth century as the ideal boats for the oyster fishery of the Connecticut shore."US

5. (birdwatching, US) Clipping of sharp-shinned hawk.Examples: "It is harder to gauge the shorter tail of sharpies, but on sitting birds the tail shape is a more useful character than it is on flying birds. Sharpies of all ages and sexes almost always show a notched tail when they are sitting."; "My mother had lost a considerable number of spring chicks to a raiding sharpie."USabbreviationalt-ofclipping

6. (birdwatching, Australia, New Zealand) Clipping of sharp-tailed sandpiper.Examples: "The bird looked of a similar character to a knot/pec sandpiper/sharpie, but the exact size was difficult to judge[.]"; "I went back into my photos, and yes, on 13 Nov, I photographed both Sharpie and the Pec."AustraliaNew-Zealandabbreviationalt-ofclipping