Pothunter
noun
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 A person who hunts animals for food (for the pot) rather than as sport.
- 2 someone who hunts for food (not for sport) wordnet
- 3 A person who competes solely to win prizes. broadly
- 4 someone who participates in contests in order to collect trophies wordnet
- 5 A person who seeks artifacts for their personal collection or to sell without regard to their cultural importance.
"But hundreds, perhaps thousands of artifacts have been taken by amateur pothunters, whose activities can disturb the soil and ruin the chance of serious research."
Show 1 more definition
- 6 a nonprofessional archeologist wordnet
Example
More examples"But hundreds, perhaps thousands of artifacts have been taken by amateur pothunters, whose activities can disturb the soil and ruin the chance of serious research."
Etymology
From pot + hunter – in hunting sense, “for the (cooking) pot (to eat)”; in the archeology sense, “seeking old pots (to sell)”.
Related phrases
More for "pothunter"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.