Home UK English street-smart

Meaning of street-smart in English:

street-smart

Pronunciation

adjective

informal North American
another term for streetwise
‘He's a sharp guy with a street-smart Brooklyn attitude.’
  • ‘I'm all street-smart about it and don't turn my head or respond, but a quick peek reveals that he's not addressing me at all.’
  • ‘Hakman's very street-smart, instinctual, with a total survivor mentality.’
  • ‘You've got to be a little street-smart to pull it off around here.’
  • ‘‘The Connection links curious, engaged listeners to street-smart conversation about the events and ideas that challenge the nation and broaden its culture,’ says its blurb.’
  • ‘The result is a pared-down, street-smart encounter between African-American cultural forms and the naked truth of love and death that undergirds Shakespeare's plot.’
  • ‘In the early 1990s, he chiselled out a career by creating street-smart, brooding soundtracks for movies that only existed in his roaming imagination, swiftly becoming critically adored in the process.’
  • ‘Through his social network of similarly constricted men of color, he acquires street-smart mobility and can access, for example, beforehand knowledge of a hit on a Filipino family.’
  • ‘The street-smart modern piece, performed on pointe, premiered in the company's London season last spring under a different and less-appropriate title.’
  • ‘The street-smart cop initially wants nothing to do with the ambitious, sophisticated lawyer, but he soon realizes she might be his only chance to save himself.’
  • ‘The result is an explosive, percussive, street-smart energy that has not been rearranged or finessed through the lens of modern and ballet techniques.’
  • ‘Designers endlessly loot the iconography, innovations and raw materials of military dress to create a new fashion that is robust, functional, provocative and street-smart.’
  • ‘They gave him everything he had hoped for as a researcher, and more; Hawa was street-smart and well-travelled, and had moved through all sections of society and among all races.’
  • ‘Imagine if I had been a street-smart black teenager.’
  • ‘But sadly, they are not street-smart as those ‘bound coolies’ were.’
  • ‘During that early time, he had a musical persona that was street-smart swagger mixed with affection for all the losers and down-and-outs.’
  • ‘She had gotten the better of the street-smart woman.’
  • ‘The street-smart kid smiled at me, holding out his hand.’
  • ‘He waved his hands around in what was supposed to be a very street-smart way.’
  • ‘Contrary to the impression given by her street-smart ways, she's always been plagued by nerves.’

noun

informal North American street smarts

  • The experience and knowledge necessary to deal with the potential difficulties or dangers of life in an urban environment.

    • ‘take the advice of somebody who's got a little more street smarts than you’