digger
Part of speech: noun
Morphological type: derivation
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.
Base: dig
Affixes: -er
Inflected forms:
form: diggers
pos: noun
tags: plural
Senses:
gloss: A large piece of machinery that digs holes or trenches.
pos: noun
examples: 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.
gloss: A tool for digging.
pos: noun
examples: The post hole digger did look ancient. I was pretty certain myself that it hadn′t dug any holes for a long, long time.
gloss: A spade (playing card).
pos: noun
tags: slang
gloss: One who digs.
pos: noun
examples: 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.
Most retrievers are not inveterate diggers — that′s a trait usually reserved for other breeds like wire-haired terriers and schnauzers.
gloss: A gold miner, one who digs for gold.
pos: noun
tags: Australia
obsolete
examples: 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.
Proofs of the presence of the white man are found all over the Territory in the shape of old bouilli tins, &c., and often when out after a strayed horse, I have imagined myself to be in wilds untrodden except by the foot of the blackfellow, but the sight of an unassuming empty sardine tin would remind me that the ubiquitous digger had been there first.
gloss: An Australian soldier.
pos: noun
tags: Australia
informal
examples: Costume played a key part in his differentiation from British soldiers as the Digger uniform came to embody Australian versions of masculinity and mateship.
For many, the congruencies of the Anzac legend and the diggers who served in Vietnam were slight, too slight, and the legend seemed unable to accommodate them.
Like many other Queensland communities, the workers from the North Ipswich Railway Workshops chose a statue of a soldier, or digger, to honour their fellow workers.
gloss: a friendly term of address, especially to a man.
pos: noun
tags: Australia
broadly
dated
gloss: A member of any Native American people in the western United States, especially Native Californians.
pos: noun
tags: US
dated
ethnic
offensive
slang
slur
vulgar
examples: 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.
From what we could see and all we could learn, they are very considerably inferior to even the despised Digger Indians of California; inferior to all races of savages on our continent; inferior to even the Terra del Fuegans; inferior to the Hottentots, and actually inferior in some respects to the Kytches of Africa.
Derived words: bonedigger
clamdiggers
digger bee
diggeress
digger pine
Diggers Camp
Diggers Rest
digger wasp
food digger
gumdigger
oil-digger
potato digger
welldigger
Translations: