public defender

1. 1.

   a lawyer who represents indigent defendants at public expense

   Broaderlawyer

   law

Questions about public defender

What does public defender mean?

public defender means "a lawyer who represents indigent defendants at public expense".

Is public defender a common word?

public defender 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.