- 1小角色、小咖、小混混（帶輕蔑，指層級不高的人）
The person: a criminal, or anyone in a trade, who works at a small and level. It is "small-time" turned into a noun for the one doing it.
So where "small-time" needs a noun after it — a small-time thief — "small-timer" stands alone: "He was just a small-timer." That word "just" turns up so often beside it that the two feel glued together, and it tells you the whole attitude — this one does not matter, look past him.
The contempt runs a little deeper than in the adjective, because now you are naming the man rather than describing his work. In crime films it is what the big boss calls the person he is about to stop bothering with. Outside crime it can describe anyone the speaker considers a minor player: a small-timer in local , a small-timer on the comedy circuit.
It is informal, spoken more than written, and more common in American English. Its opposite is "big-timer", though that one is rarer.
From the word’s history
From small time + -er.
由 small time「小規模」加 -er 組成。
組成small time（低檔次）+ -er（做這件事的人）。-er 一路從古英語 -ere 傳下來，就是 teacher、driver 的那個 -er。
同家族的字
- small-timethe adjective this noun is built from
- old-timersame time + -er build: a person of an earlier era
- teachersame -er ending: the one who does the thing
原始詞典資料1 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
small-timernoun
- 1
A person who is limited to small, petty or unimportant things.
- She hated Ed Feinberg, the sleazy, lying, blood-sucking small-timer. Still he was a man; if he had called her up in the old days, in Seattle, she'd have entertained him.
- The small-timers, as he put it, kept their currency in their homes, in safes, in false ceilings, under beds. When necessary, our tax people know where to look. The big-timers, however, use Swiss banks.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。