nightman

plural nightmen · alternative night-man · alternative night man

1. historicalA person whose job is cleaning cesspools or sewers, or emptying privies by night.

   Near-synonyms: nightsoiler, shit-carter

   3 more examples

   1722, Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, London: E. Nutt (etc.), p. 54, That the Laystalls be removed as far as may be out of the City, and common Passages, and that no Nightman or other be suffered to empty a Vault into any Garden near about the City.

   1825, Robert Mudie, London and Londoners; or, A Second Judgment of “Babylon the Great”, London: H. Colburn, 2nd edition, 1836, p. 197, Still [the rats] are an organized race, and can combine together for the purposes both of attack and defence; as the nightmen who clean the sewers and cesspools of Babylon often find. The travels of a nightman have never been published; but they would make a very curious book. As they worm their way along those dismal passages, they often find an army of rats drawn up to oppose their farther progress […]

   1851, Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, London: G. Woodfall & Son, Volume II, The Street-Folk, p. 193, I have met with nightmen who have told me that there was “nothing particular” in the smell of the cesspools they were emptying; they “hardly perceived it.” One man said, “Why, it’s like the sort of stuff I’ve smelt in them ladies’ smelling-bottles.”

   Synonyms: night soil man, nightsoiler, shit-carter

2. datedA male night shift worker.

   Doorman John Healy comes to work Sunday morning bringing a partly finished bottle of whiskey. He greets his colleague, George Tiernan, nightman, with the suggestion that they “kill the quart” before Mr. Tiernan goes home.

   1927 December 11, “Vandals”, in Time

   1 more example

   Most men who are of sufficient intelligence and moral character to make thoroughly satisfactory block signalmen will naturally seek a respite occasionally from such a confining routine, and if they cannot accomplish this without securing a substitute at their own expense they are under constant temptation to “change off”—the day man working for the nightman and the nightman for the day.

   1907 April 5, The Railroad Gazette, volume 42, number 14, page 482

3. A nightwatchman; a guard who works at night.