A tallyman; a village usurer; a money-lender. The word is of Irish extraction.
“They suppose that the tenants can have no other supply of capital than from the gombeen man.”—Egmont Hake: Free Trade in Capital, p. 375.
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Entry taken from Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, edited by the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. and revised in 1895.
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