digger

noun

1. 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. 2

   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.

3. 3

   slangA spade (playing card).

4. 4

   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.

   Most retrievers are not inveterate diggers — that′s a trait usually reserved for other breeds like wire-haired terriers and schnauzers.

5. 5

   obsoleteA gold miner, one who digs for gold.

   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.

6. 6

   informalAn Australian soldier.

   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.

7. 7

   dateda friendly term of address, especially to a man.

8. 8

   datedA member of any Native American people in the western United States, especially Native Californians.

   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.

Forms

plural

diggers