stringer

American  

[string-er] / ˈstrɪŋ ər /

noun

1. a person or thing that strings.

2. a long horizontal timber connecting upright posts.

3. Architecture. string.

4. Civil Engineering. a longitudinal bridge girder for supporting part of a deck or railroad track between bents or piers.

5. a longitudinal reinforcement in the fuselage or wing of an airplane.

6. Also called string correspondent.  Journalism. a part-time newspaper correspondent covering a local area for a paper published elsewhere.

   The Los Angeles paper has a correspondent in San Francisco but only a stringer in Seattle.

7. a stout string, rope, etc., strung through the gills and mouth of newly caught fish, so that they may be carried or put back in the water to keep them alive or fresh.

8. a contestant, player, or other person ranked according to skill or accomplishment (used in combination).

   Most of the conductors at the opera house were third-stringers.

9. Mining. a small vein or seam of ore, coal, etc.

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stringer British  

/ ˈstrɪŋə /

noun

1. architect

   1. a long horizontal beam that is used for structural purposes

   2. another name for stringboard

2. nautical a longitudinal structural brace for strengthening the hull of a vessel

3. a journalist retained by a newspaper or news service on a part-time basis to cover a particular town or area

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Other Word Forms

• restringer noun

Etymology

Origin of stringer

late Middle English word dating back to 1375–1425; string, -er ¹

Example Sentences

She started her career as a stringer for the Chicago Tribune, covering local government in the city’s northern suburbs during the 2009 recession.

From The Wall Street Journal • Feb. 2, 2026

Dominoes fall quickly and hard for 33-year-old budding reporter Sara Byrne, assigned as a freelance stringer by the fictional London Tribune to cover the 2012 Gaza War.

From Los Angeles Times • Aug. 7, 2025

Chandrakar used to also work as a "stringer" for news organisations, where his job involved providing outstation journalists with information about a story or sometimes, even chaperoning them through Maoist strongholds.

From BBC • Jan. 8, 2025

She moved to Jerusalem in 1966, at age 20, and lived there through two wars and one peace treaty, working as a journalist for The Jerusalem Post and as a stringer for Time magazine.

From New York Times • May 7, 2024

They were lying behind a wooden stringer in the lot before he even got near the door.

From "Cannery Row" by John Steinbeck

Related Words

• author
• biographer
• columnist
• correspondent
• critic
• dramatist
• editor
• essayist
• journalist
• novelist
• poet
• reporter
• screenwriter