wood-hewer

plural wood-hewers · alternative woodhewer · alternative wood hewer

1. One who earns a living by splitting wood.

   "I must hasten," he said. “Old Peter Cobb, a wood-hewer, is dying.”

   2014, Anya Seton, Green Darkness, →ISBN

   3 more examples

   But the present task was hateful to him; for any big-armed yokel, or common wood-hewer, might have done as much as he could do, and perhaps more, at it, and could have taken the same wage over it.

   1886 April – 1887 April, Richard Doddridge Blackmore, “Long-pipe Times”, in Springhaven. A Tale of the Great War. […], volume I, London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, […], published 1887, →OCLC, pages 295–296

   One of the officers thought it unavoidable that troops would abandon the “uniformity of the clean, smart, soldier, and substitute, in his stead, the [look of the] slovenly, undisciplined wood-hewer, sand-digger, and hod-carrier.”

   2011, David A. Clary, George Washington's First War: His Early Military Adventures, →ISBN, page 130

   My stomach was hooked by an admixture of bewilderment and elation as I jogged, walked, ran, and sometimes ran, walked and jogged till I reached Biodun's house, my senior at school— breathing heavily like a wood-hewer.

   2016, Yemi D. Prince, The Birth of a Child in a Fishing Boat, →ISBN, page 63