Tusker
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 An animal, such as a bull elephant or a boar, with large tusks.
"By climbing trees they had had a fairly good view of the herd, which they described as numbering several large tuskers, a great many cows and calves, and full-grown bulls whose ivory would be worth having."
- 2 A tool used in peat cutting, a type of turf spade similar to a cascrom. Orkney, Scotland, Shetland, UK, especially
- 3 any mammal with prominent tusks (especially an elephant or wild boar) wordnet
Example
More examples"Mr. Mercer, who in 1846 was the principal civil officer of Government at Badulla, sent me a jagged fragment of an elephant’s tusk, about five inches in diameter, and weighing between twenty and thirty pounds, which had been brought to him by some natives, who, being attracted by a noise in the jungle, witnessed a combat between a tusker and one without tusks, and saw the latter with his trunk seize one of the tusks of his antagonist and wrench from it the portion in question, which measured two feet in length."
Etymology
From tusk + -er.
From Old Norse torfskeri, from torf (“turf”) + skera (“to cut”), whence also Scottish Gaelic tairsgeir, toirsgeir, treidhsgeir and later forms like toirsgian (assimilated to sgian (“knife”)). Known in print from the early 19th century, but doubtless much older.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.