costermonger (plural costermongers)

1. (British) A trader who sells fruit and vegetables from a cart or barrow in the street.
   • c. 1597, William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2, Act I, Scene 2,

     Virtue is of little regard in these costermongers’ times that true valour turn’d berod [...]

   • 1850, Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, Chapter 23,

     We arrived at Lincoln’s Inn Fields without any new adventures, except encountering an unlucky donkey in a costermonger’s cart, who suggested painful associations to my aunt.

   • 1889, Oscar Wilde, “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” Chapter 1, in Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories,

     He was an extraordinary old aristocrat, who swore like a costermonger, and had the manners of a farmer.

   • 1899 September – 1900 July​, Joseph Conrad, chapter XIII, in Lord Jim: A Tale, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, published 1900, OCLC 8754022 ↗, pages 160–161 ↗:

     He had loved too well to imagine himself a glorious racehorse, and now he was condemned to toil without honour like a costermonger’s donkey.

   • 1913, Ford Madox Ford, Mr. Fleight, London: Howard Latimer, Chapter 7, p. 93,

     The twilight was still in the dusky skies; the walking took her nearly always over pieces of wrapping paper and banana peels, and the sawdust and detritus that fell from the costermongers’ stalls, lining all the roadways.

• fruiterer
• fruitmonger
• fruitseller