blackleg

Other forms of blackleg

plural

blacklegs·

past tense or participle

blacklegged

present participle

blacklegging

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about blackleg

What does blackleg mean?

blackleg means "someone who works (or provides workers) during a strike". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in blackleg?

blackleg has 2 syllables: blac-kleg. The stress falls on "blac".

What is another word for blackleg?

Close synonyms include scab, strikebreaker, rat, fink, scab. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is blackleg a common word?

blackleg is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.