poacher turned gamekeeper
Proposed by a contributor, not yet supported by evidence.
Meaning · English
Someone who used to cause problems now tries to solve them
Nghĩa · Tiếng Việt
Người từng gây ra vấn đề giờ试 giải quyết chúng
Machine-translated — suggest a fix
Literally: a hunter of wild game now protects it
Where it’s used:
Used
Widespread English
Examples
Walsh, as fund - raising co - ordinator, and Hayling, as ‘ poacher turned gamekeeper’(as Everett described him), had been sounding out potential ‘ movement’ investors for months.
Have they experienced the phenomenon of poacher - turned - gamekeeper or gamekeeper - turned - poacher?
British National Corpus sentence via the MAGPIE corpus (CC BY 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-30)
Sources & notes
Listed in Wiktionary’s “English idioms” category (retrieved 2026-07-29); definition pending editorial review. Definition drafted by AI (@cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast) and auto-approved by rule on 2026-07-31; pending editor spot-check.
Common questions
What does “poacher turned gamekeeper” mean?
Someone who used to cause problems now tries to solve them Literally: a hunter of wild game now protects it
Is “poacher turned gamekeeper” formal or informal?
No register label has been reviewed yet — treat it as neutral and check the usage notes above.