digger

plural diggers

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.

   1952 January, “Electrification Progress in Norway”, in Railway Magazine, page 55

   Synonyms: excavator

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.

   2009, Sharon Bomgaars, The Best Clubhouse Ever, page 143

3. slangA spade (playing card).
4. One who digs.

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

   2005, Gary R. Sampson, Dick Wolfsie, Dog Dilemmas: Simple Solutions to Everyday Problems, page 130

   1 more example

   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.

   1997, Barbara J. Wrede, Civilizing Your Puppy, page 75

5. AustraliaobsoleteA 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.

   1853, Charles Dickens, editor, Household Words, volume 21, page 64

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   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.

   1887, Harriet W. Daly, Digging, Squatting, and Pioneering Life in the Northern Territory of South Australia, page 342

6. AustraliainformalAn 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.

   1998, Helen Gilbert, Sightlines: Race, Gender, and Nation in Contemporary Australian Theatre, page 191

   2 more examples

   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.

   2002, Jeff Doyle, Jeffrey Grey, Peter Pierce, Australia's Vietnam War, page xxiii

   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.

   2004, Lisanne Gibson, Joanna Besley, Monumental Queensland: Signposts on a Cultural Landscape, page 99

7. Australiabroadlydateda friendly term of address, especially to a man.
8. USdatedethnicoffensiveslangslurvulgarA 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.

   1974, Robert F. Heizer, editor, They Were Only Diggers: A Collection of Articles from California Newspapers, 1851-1866, on Indian and White Relations, Ramona: Ballena Press, page 99

   1 more example

   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.

   1872, Mark Twain, chapter XIX, in Roughing It, Hartford: American Publishing Company

plural Diggers

1. A soldier from Australia or New Zealand.
2. historicalOne of a group of Protestant English agrarian communists, begun by Gerrard Winstanley as "True Levellers" in 1649.
3. derogatoryobsoleteOne of a degraded tribe of California Native Americans who dug up roots for food.

   Synonyms: Shoshokie, Shoshoko

plural Diggers

1. InternetA user of the American news aggregator Digg.

   Redditors are similar to Diggers (twentysomething geeks), albeit the former are slightly more educated and gender neutral.

   2009 November, Dan Zarrella, “Social News and Bookmarking”, in The Social Media Marketing Book, O’Reilly Media, published 2011, section “Reddit”, page 121

   2 more examples

   THANKS TO DIGG, the Web’s most frequented news-ranking site, we now know: Geeks like gaming gossip, incendiary technology policy stories, and NASA photos. Diggers vote early and often, and can get breaking news to the front page surprisingly quickly.

   2006, PC World, page 115

   As Justin Halpern told me, “I think what both [Rob Corddry and actress Kristen Bell] did, especially Rob, was that they got Shit My Dad Says seen by people that aggressively share stuff online. Diggers, Redditors, etc.[…]”

   2012 September, B. J. Mendelson, “And Now You Know … the Rest of the Story”, in Social Media Is Bullshit, New York, N.Y.: St. Martin’s Press, →ISBN, part I, page 53