gallows bird

1. 1.

   a person who deserves to be hanged

   Broadervillain

Questions about gallows bird

What does gallows bird mean?

gallows bird means "a person who deserves to be hanged".

Is gallows bird a common word?

gallows bird 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.