Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. a woman who scavenges for rags in the street.

1705–07		N. Ward Hudibras Redivivus II:2 25: Punks, Strolers, Market Dames and Bunters.
1723		C. Walker Authentick Memoirs of Sally Salisbury 12: At different Seasons of the Year, she shell’d Beans [...] made Matches, turn’d Bunter &c.
1737		Pope Mother Gin 13: Their brats with scraps half fed / To cold-tea streams [...] no Bunters led.
1764		Low-life 9: Bunters, with Bits of Candle between their Fingers and Baskets upon their Heads, rummaging the dirty Dunghills [...] for Rags and Bones.
1861		(con. 1840s–50s) H. Mayhew London Labour and London Poor II 142/1: They were known by the name of bunters, which signifies properly gatherers of rags.

2. (also bunt) a poor, poss. thieving, prostitute.

1713		N. Ward Poetical Entertainer V 25: Ye Beaus and ye Bells, Who subsist by your Tails, And ye diving Nightwalkers and Bunters, Who are stroling to Day, Very Frolick and Gay, And to Morrow, in Workhouse or Counters.
1722		‘Whipping-Tom’ Universal Poison, or the Dismal Effects of Tea II 12: Even Women who cry Grey-Pease [...] Flat-Caps, Bunters, and all the Scum of the Nation, cannot go to Break-fast without a Dish of it.
1732		Delightful Adventures of Honest John Cole 19: In the Mornings we’re all Fortune-hunters, / Then spend half our Crop, / And go to the Hop, / And the Night we all spend with the Bunters.
1741		‘Capt. Samuel Cock’ Voyage to Lethe 65: Mother K--- [...] brought up the Rear [...] with her Street-Walkers and Bunters.
c.1758		John F---g Epistle of a Reformed Rake 9: Park-walkers, Street-walkers, Bunters, and Bulk-mongers, are the greatest Pest to Society.
1761		Nancy Dawson’s Jests 36: From the luscious tit bit to the bouncing jack whore, / From the bunters in rags to the gay pompadore.
1765		H. Howard Choice Spirits Museum 13: Clerkenwell its Saffron-Hill, With many a Bunt and Brim.
1772		Bridges Burlesque Homer (3rd edn) 189: If jove will let these vermin hunters / Use Goddesses like common bunters.
1785, 1788, 1796		Grose Classical Dict. of the Vulgar Tongue n.p.: Bunter, a low dirty prostitute, half whore and half beggar.
1790		‘Bumper Allnight. Esquire’ Honest Fellow 184: As a bunter in an alley, / Uncover’d her belly, / A shoe-boy begot me upon her.
1790		‘Bumper Allnight. Esquire’ Honest Fellow 185: His trull and himself / Made too free with some pelf, / For which Justice whip-cord had smote ’em; / The bunt was releas’d, / She the magistrate pleas’d, / So I stuck to the constable’s scrotum.
c.1811		‘A Leary Mot’ in Farmer Musa Pedestris (1896) 78: Mog up with her daddle bang-up to the mark, and she blacked the Bunter’s eye.
1822		‘Life in London’ in C. Hindley James Catnach (1878) 128: There was bunters, and ranters, and radical chaunters.
1830		Egan Finish to the Adventures of Tom and Jerry (1889) 195: If you persist in following that bunter and enter that infamous house, I will stop you [etc.].
1844		Kendal Mercury 21 Sept. 1/2: ‘Bunting Sall’ proposes [...] ‘goo an’ fetch a drain o’ gin’.
1850		E.V. Kenealy Goethe: a New Pantomime in Poetical Works 2 (1878) 334: Fie, for shame! / Is she not a monstrous bunter?
1862		E. de la Bédollière Londres et les Anglais 313/1: bunter, femme de bas étage.
1873		Sl. Dict. 104: Bunter, a prostitute, a street-walking female thief.
1973		R. Todasco Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Dirty Words.

3. a prostitute who hires lodgings, uses them for a short time, then leaves without paying her rent.

1861		(con. 1840s–50s) H. Mayhew London Labour and London Poor (1968) IV 223/1: There is a class of women technically known as ‘bunters,’ who take lodgings, and after staying some time run away without paying the rent. [...] A ‘bunter,’ whose favourite promenade especially on Sundays, was the New Cut, Lambeth, said, ‘she never paid any rent, hadn’t done it for years, and never meant to’.
1882		Sydney Sl. Dict. (2 edn) 2: Bunters - Loose women who take lodgings and then leave without paying the old bawd.

4. ‘a woman thief of the lowest possible kind’ (Ware).

a.1880		‘Hop Picking in Kent’ in Henderson Victorian Street Ballads (1937) 121: Fine Betsey the bunter from London / From out of St. Giles’s did prance.
1909		J. Ware Passing Eng. of the Victorian Era.

5. (US gay) a stereotypically effeminate male homosexual.

1972

B. Rodgers Queens’ Vernacular 72: stereotype effeminate homosexual [...] bunter (pej, hetero sl, ’30s, fr Brit bunter = woman rag picker = a whore).