Refine this word faster
Digger
Definitions
- 1 A large piece of machinery that digs holes or trenches.
"The cables are placed from 16 in. to 2 ft. down, and to save time and labour use was made of a mechanical digger lent by the Swedish State Railways."
- 2 A soldier from Australia or New Zealand.
- 3 A user of the American news aggregator Digg. Internet
"THANKS TO DIGG, the Web’s most frequented news-ranking site, we now know: Geeks like gaming gossip, incendiary technology policy stories, and NASA photos. Diggers vote early and often, and can get breaking news to the front page surprisingly quickly."
- 4 a machine for excavating wordnet
- 5 A tool for digging.
"The post hole digger did look ancient. I was pretty certain myself that it hadn′t dug any holes for a long, long time."
Show 9 more definitions
- 6 One of a group of Protestant English agrarian communists, begun by Gerrard Winstanley as "True Levellers" in 1649. historical
- 7 a laborer who digs wordnet
- 8 A spade (playing card). slang
- 9 One of a degraded tribe of California Native Americans who dug up roots for food. derogatory, obsolete
- 10 One who digs.
"You′ve tried the supposedly sure method of squirting the digger with water from a hose, and that hasn′t worked.[…]This step will discourage 99 percent of the diggers."
- 11 A gold miner, one who digs for gold. Australia, obsolete
"A successful Australian digger — successful, not merely in siftings and washings, but bearing the title, and its best credentials, of a “nuggetter” − came down from Forest Creek recently and took up his abode in a low lodging-house in Little Bourke Street, Melbourne."
- 12 An Australian soldier. Australia, informal
"Costume played a key part in his differentiation from British soldiers as the Digger uniform came to embody Australian versions of masculinity and mateship."
- 13 a friendly term of address, especially to a man. Australia, broadly, dated
- 14 A member of any Native American people in the western United States, especially Native Californians. US, dated, ethnic, offensive, slang, slur, vulgar
"White men are not usually hanged for killing Chinamen, but Indians who commit such a crime are strung up with little ceremony. Last week a Digger was hung at Jackson, Amador county, for having last summer murdered some Chinamen at Rancheria."
Etymology
From Middle English dyggar, equivalent to dig + -er. In the sense of "Australian soldier", attributed to the considerable time that soldiers spent digging trenches during World War I.
* Derived from Australian Colonial goldfields terminology. The term represents the mateship of common interests and activities where most of the population were gold miners, and almost everybody was a mate, a "digger", with a common cause against the troopers, the traps, the mining license inspectors.
From Digg + -er.
See also for "digger"
Next best steps
Mini challenge
Unscramble this word: digger