street smarts

1. 1.

   a shrewd ability to survive in a dangerous urban environment

   Broadershrewdness

Questions about street smarts

What does street smarts mean?

street smarts means "a shrewd ability to survive in a dangerous urban environment".

Is street smarts a common word?

street smarts 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.