collier

plural colliers

1. A person in the business or occupation of producing or distributing coal (any of several types of carbon fuel).
   1. datedhistoricalA person who produces (e.g., digs, mines, gathers) or sells coal (the fossil fuel type), or transports it from underground, from the soil, or from a seashore.

      Near-synonyms: coalminer, coalworker; coalowner, mineowner

      2 more examples

      The Black Dwarfs wear black jackets and caps, are not handsome like the others, but on the contrary are horridly ugly, with weeping eyes, like blacksmiths and colliers.

      1828, Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology, volume I, London: William Harrison Ainsworth, page 283

      No caps were touched, no curtseys bobbed. The colliers merely stared; the tradesmen lifted their caps to Connie as to an acquaintance, and nodded awkwardly to Clifford; that was all. [...] It was not that she and Clifford were unpopular, they merely belonged to another species altogether from the colliers. Gulf impassable, breach indescribable, such as is perhaps non-existent south of the Trent.

      1928, D[avid] H[erbert] Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, [Germany?]: Privately printed, →OCLC

      Synonyms: coalminer, coalworker, coalowner, mineowner

   2. datedhistoricalA person in the business or occupation of producing (and selling) charcoal.

      For this reason, the collier took constant care to keep the covering of earth in good order.

      1957, H.R. Schubert, History of the British Iron and Steel Industry, page 224

      Synonyms: charcoal burner

2. nauticalA vessel carrying a bulk cargo of coal.

   By 1830, more than two million tons of coal a year, principally from the North East, arrived in London by coastal collier, and that figure reached three million tons by the 1840s.

   2021 December 1, Nigel Harris, “St Pancras and King's Cross: 1947”, in RAIL, number 945, page 42

   Synonyms: coaler

3. nauticalA sailor on such a vessel.
4. slangA non-traveller.

1. A surname originating as an occupation.
2. An unincorporated community in Monroe County, Georgia, United States.
3. A township in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States.