Deadbeat (Dead Beat)

Entry in progress—B.P.
 
Free Merriam-Webster Dictionaryt
Definition of DEADBEAT
1: loafer
2: one who persistently fails to pay personal debts or expenses
Examples of DEADBEAT
. His friends are just a bunch of deadbeats.
. He was accused of being a deadbeat.
First Known Use of DEADBEAT
1863
 
Answers.com
Business Dictionary: Deadbeat
In general: one who does not pay his bills. In contrast to a freeloader or Deadhead, who doesn’t pay the (train) fare but doesn’t necessarily add cost to the service provider, the deadbeat runs up a bill for goods and services that he uses individually, without payment.
 
Accounting: credit customer who, without just cause, has not paid for his order by the end of the Billing Cycle. Names of deadbeats are removed from the active customer list and may be used later as a purge file against promotion lists. See also Bad Debt.
   
(Oxford English Dictionary)
dead beat, dead-beat, ppl. a. (n.2)
slang (orig. U.S.). A worthless idler who sponges on his friends; a sponger, loafer; also (orig. Austral.), a man down on his luck. Also attrib. Cf. BEAT n.1 16.
1863 Cornhill Mag. Jan. 94 ‘Beau’ Hickman [was] a professional pensioner, or, in the elegant phraseology of the place ‘a deadbeat’.
1875 Chicago Tribune 13 Oct. 4/4 To go on a dead-beat spree.
1877 BLACK Green Past. xli. (1878) 325 A system of local government controlled by 30,000 bummers, loafers, and dead-beats.
1882 B. HARTE Flip ii, Every tramp and dead-beat you’ve met.
1898 MORRIS Austral Eng. 115/2 Deadbeat. In Australia, it means a man ‘down on his luck’, ‘stone-broke’, beaten by fortune.
1902 W. SATCHELL Land of Lost iii. 18 This is the stranding-ground of the dead-beats of the world.