cracksman

English

Etymology

From crack +‎ -s- +‎ -man.

Noun

cracksman (plural cracksmen)

1. (archaic, informal) A burglar or safebreaker.
   • 1874, Marcus Clarke, For the Term of his Natural Life, Penguin, published 2009, page 52:

     The fraudulent clerk and the flash “cracksman” interchanged experiences.

   • 1914, Louis Joseph Vance, chapter III, in Nobody, New York, N.Y.: George H[enry] Doran Company, published 1915, →OCLC:

     She was frankly disappointed. For some reason she had thought to discover a burglar of one or another accepted type—either a dashing cracksman in full-blown evening dress, lithe, polished, pantherish, or a common yegg, a red-eyed, unshaven burly brute in the rags and tatters of a tramp.

   • 1916, Melville Davisson Post, “The Man Hunters”, in The Saturday Evening Post‎^[1]:

     The bank cracksmen who looted the national bank at Northampton were traced by a piece of wrapping paper picked up in an abandoned schoolhouse.