navvy
Sign in to saveAlso known as navigational engineer
thumb|right|250px|A "navvy" depicted in Ford Madox Brown's painting Work Navvy, a clipping of navigator (UK) or navigational engineer (US), mainly refers to the manual labourers working on major civil engineering projects, though it is also used in North America to refer to mechanical shovels and earth moving machinery. The term was coined in the late 18th century in Great Britain when numerous canals were being built, which were also sometimes known as "navigations".
In the Vinony graph
Vinony's link graph records 257 inbound references to navvy, and connects out to The New Yorker, United States and Australia.
It sits within the topics Canals in the United Kingdom, Railway occupations and Stereotypes of the working class.
Vinony links it to 4 Wikipedia language editions.
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- profession
- Field of work
- underground construction
- Image
- Rallare. Arbete på dubbelspåret mellan Stockholm och Uppsala vid Alsike - Nordiska Museet - NMA.0036614.jpg
Show 2 more facts
- Commons category
- Navvies
- described by source
- Encyclopædia Britannica 11th edition
Sources (1)
via Wikidata · CC0
~13 min read
Encyclopedic overview
12 sectionsContents
- Nationalities
- Migration from canal to railway projects
- Navvy culture
- Living conditions
- Working conditions for railway navvies
- Navvy slang
- Contemporary use of the term "navvy"
- In popular culture
- See also
- References
- Bibliography
- Further reading
thumb|right|250px|A "navvy" depicted in Ford Madox Brown's painting Work Navvy, a clipping of navigator (UK) or navigational engineer (US), mainly refers to the manual labourers working on major civil engineering projects, though it is also used in North America to refer to mechanical shovels and earth moving machinery. The term was coined in the late 18th century in Great Britain when numerous canals were being built, which were also sometimes known as "navigations".
== Nationalities == A study of 19th-century British railway contracts by David Brooke, coinciding with census returns, showed that the great majority of navvies in Britain were English. He also stated that "only the ubiquitous Irish can be regarded as a truly international force in railway construction," but the Irish were only about 30% of the navvies.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “navvy” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.