Digger

How to spell digger

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce digger

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does digger mean?

1. nounA powered machine used for excavating earth, such as a mechanical excavator.
2. nounA person who digs, especially in mining, archaeology, or manual labour.

Digger in a sentence

• The builders hired a digger to clear the foundations.

• Each gold digger staked a claim along the river.

• A yellow digger scooped soil into the waiting truck.

• The archaeology team relied on one careful digger for the delicate layers.

Where does digger come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word is built on the verb 'dig', whose own origin is genuinely murky; it surfaces in Middle English around the 1300s, possibly from an unrecorded Old English form and probably reinforced by the Old French 'diguer', meaning to make a dike or ditch, itself linked to the same Germanic family as 'dike' and 'ditch'. To 'dig' originally meant to break up and turn over earth with a tool, and adding the agent suffix '-er' produced 'digger', literally 'one who digs'. By the 1500s it named a person doing the labour, and as mechanisation spread it was naturally extended to the machines, so today a 'digger' is far more often a powered excavator than a person with a spade. In Australian and New Zealand usage it became affectionate slang for a soldier, a sense rooted in the trench-digging of the First World War. The spelling trap is purely the doubled 'g': because 'dig' has a short stressed vowel, the consonant doubles before '-er', exactly as in 'runner' or 'bigger'.

How the word is built

• dig (to break up and turn over ground)
• -g- (doubled consonant after a short stressed vowel)
• -er (agent suffix: one who, or thing that, does)