Definition of "colporteur" []

• A peddler of devotional literature. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "A heart-shaped bivalve or a garden flower. colporteur"
• "Hence he was a sort of volunteer colporteur distributing gossip, as a notion pedler, before he was a store clerk where centered all the local news."
• "A colporteur, known to me, when engaged selling Bibles in a Brazilian town, reports that the fanatical populace got his books and carried them, fastened and burning, at the end of blazing torches, while they tramped the streets, yelling: "Away with all false books!""