lifer

plural lifers

1. A prisoner sentenced to life in prison.
2. A prisoner sentenced to transportation for life.

   They know what a clever lad he is; he'll be a lifer. They'll make the Artful nothing less than a lifer.

   1838, Boz [pseudonym; Charles Dickens], Oliver Twist; […], volume (please specify |volume=I, II, or III), London: Richard Bentley, […], →OCLC

3. A person with a singular career path, especially in the military.

   He was a baseball lifer, a seamhead through and through, who just absolutely liked nothing better than sitting down and talking baseball.

   2018, Adrian Dater, 100 Things Rockies Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die

   3 more examples

   "[…]The Top's not a lifer; he's a career Marine. Lifers are a breed. A lifer is anybody who abuses authority he doesn't deserve to have. There are plenty of civilian lifers."

   1979, Gustav Hasford, The Short-Timers, New York: Bantam Books, published 1980, →ISBN, page 63

   LRRP planned to become “career” Army, i.e., a lifer, you kept that quiet. Basic LRRP theology said the Army sucked and that philosophy kept one from going crazy because, at the bottom, nothing about the war seemed to make sense anyway. The LRRP's considered a lifer a loser. Being a lifer implied one had no other options available. Every LRRP had his own stories about back home: about family, friends, lovers, opportunities, dreams and a future. These were mostly fantasy, but […]

   2002, Paul Newman, Nine From The Ninth, iUniverse, →ISBN, page 17

   In the early years of EMS, the term lifer was an entitlement pinned to anyone who had worked the road for ten years or longer with no real plans of seeking a replacement trade. It was a term that was generally delivered in a respectful and lighthearted teasing manner by someone who by all definitions could have easily been described as a lifer himself—with the exception of one drawback. So far, the crews didn't know anyone who had worked in the field for ten years, much less longer […]

   2005, J. M. Coutts, As the Beacon Turns, Trafford Publishing, →ISBN, page 392

4. biologyA species seen for the first time by a birder or other naturalist who is keeping a list of all the species they have seen.

   We have concurred that it was clearly Problema byssus, the byssus skipper: a lifer for me.

   2010, Robert Michael Pyle, Mariposa Road: The First Butterfly Big Year, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, →ISBN

   2 more examples

   It is difficult to classify them precisely, but, in roughly ascending order of productivity, we now recognise the purely chance observer, the locality regulars (now recognising that ‘time in’ eventually equals ‘rarity out’), the ringers (particularly when working in groups), the occasional tally-hunter (most of us, if we are honest), the full-time observatory workers (exhibiting the highest standards of discipline) and the growing group of full-blooded rarity collectors (self-styled ‘twitchers’, covering individually up to 30,000 miles in their annual pursuit of ‘lifers’).

   1970, D.I.M. Wallace, “The first ten years of the Rarities Committee”, in British Birds, volume 63, number 3, London, page 124

   I saw six species of honeyeaters new to me and went home with 16 lifers and some bad sandfly bites.

   2013, Sue Taylor, Best 100 Birdwatching Sites in Australia

   Synonyms: life bird