subs. (common).—1.  An exceptional person or thing: hence SCREAMING = first-rate, splendid: spec. as causing screams of laughter.

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  1846.  T. B. THORPE, The Mysteries of the Backwoods, 134. If he’s a specimen of the Choctaws that live in these parts, they are SCREAMERS.

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  1847.  W. T. PORTER, ed., A Quarter Race in Kentucky, etc., 189. ‘Now look out for a SCREAMER!’

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  1853.  WHYTE-MELVILLE, Digby Grand, xx. I am in for a SCREAMER, and the bill for which I am arrested is only a ruse to prevent my leaving England.

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  1864.  HOTTEN, The Slang Dictionary, s.v. SCREAMING … Believed to have been used in the Adelphi play-bills: “a SCREAMING farce,” one calculated to make the audience SCREAM with laughter.

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  1874.  BEETON, The Siliad, 49.

        There’ll be no child’s play in the Russian hug,
’Twill be a ‘SCREAMER,’ and a frightful tug.

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  1879.  M. E. BRADDON, The Cloven Foot, vi. “Well,” cried the manager, radiant, “a SCREAMING success. There’s money in it. I shall run this three hundred nights.”

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  1883.  Daily Telegraph, 19 Jan., 3, 5. A more amusing half-hour could not be spent than under the influence of this farce, which, in the old Adelphi days would most emphatically have been called a SCREAMER. Ibid. (1888), 8 Dec. The ‘Deputy-Registrar’ is a SCREAMER indeed.

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  1888.  J. RUNCIMAN, The Chequers, 38. She’s a SCREAMER, she’s a real swell.

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  1891.  Sporting Life, 25 March. The piece, which is of the SCREAMING order of farce, certainly produces abundant laughter.

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  1893.  MILLIKEN, ’Arry Ballads, 77, ‘On Marriage.’ Yank on to one gal, a fair SCREAMER.

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  2.  (thieves’).—A thief who, robbed by another thief, applies to the police; in American a SQUEALER (q.v.).

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