English

Noun

Sharpie ‎(plural Sharpies)

1. A brand of felt-tipped marker pen.

English

Alternative forms

• (member of an Australian youth gang): sharp

Noun

sharpie ‎(plural sharpies)

1. An alert person. (Can we add an example for this sense?)
2. (US, regional) A knowledgeable fisherman.
   • 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.

3. (US) A swindler.
   • 1953, Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, Penguin 2010, p. 102:

     Three booths down a couple of sharpies were selling each other pieces of Twentieth Century Fox, using double arm gestures instead of money.

4. (US) A long, narrow fishing boat used in shallow waters.
   • 1995, Rodney Barfield, Seasoned by Salt: A Historical Album of the Outer Banks, page 168,

     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 vesel of moderate size, comparable to a sloop or schooner.

   • 2006, Greg Rössel, The Boatbuilder's Apprentice, page 293,

     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.

5. (birdwatching) Short for sharp-shinned hawk.
   • 2005, Bill Thompson, Eirik A. T. Blom, Jeffrey A. Gordon, Identify Yourself: The 50 Most Common Birding Identification Challenges, page 93,

     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.

   • 2010, Era S. VanDenburg, The Natural World of Ivy Lane, page 48,

     My mother had lost a considerable number of spring chicks to a raiding sharpie.

6. (Australia) A member of a violent, fashionably dressed youth gang of the 1960s and 1970s.
   • 2006, Iain McIntyre, Tomorrow Is Today: Australia in the Psychedelic Era, 1966-1970, page 47,

     The Circle Ballroom in High Street Preston was another popular sharpie hang-out. […] Sharpies were all deep drinkers.

7. A Sharpie or other brand of felt-tipped marker pen.

Anagrams

• harpies, shar-pei, spheria