Staffer

How to spell staffer

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce staffer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does staffer mean?

1. nounA member of the staff of an organisation, such as a newspaper, campaign, or office.

Staffer in a sentence

• A senior staffer drafted the press release before lunch.

• Every staffer in the newsroom received the new style guide.

Where does staffer come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word grows out of staff, which in Old English was stæf, meaning a walking stick or pole. From that concrete object the sense broadened metaphorically: just as a pole supports a structure, a group of assistants came to be thought of as the support that holds up a leader or an organisation, and by the eighteenth century staff named a body of employees. The agent suffix -er, an ordinary native ending used to mark a person who belongs to or does something, was then attached to give staffer, meaning simply one member of that staff. This particular coinage is comparatively recent and distinctly American, surfacing in twentieth-century journalism and politics to label a working member of a newspaper, a campaign, or a government office. Although it began as American newsroom slang, it spread into general British and Canadian use as well, and the doubled f reflects the spelling of the parent word staff rather than any pronunciation quirk.

How the word is built

• staff (a body of employees, from Old English stæf)
• -er (agent suffix denoting a member)