Other forms: diggers
A digger is a machine that scoops earth out of the ground. A yellow digger, hire a digger, the digger arrived.
It is the everyday British word for what the industry calls an excavator, and mini-digger is the small hired kind. JCB is a brand name used as a generic in Britain, much like Hoover. A digger is also anybody who digs, and in Australian and New Zealand usage Digger is an affectionate term for a soldier, from the trench digging of the First World War.
1noundiggerA machine that scoops earth out of the ground.
“A yellow digger scooped earth out of the hole for the new swimming pool.”
synonyms: excavator
digger is a machine.
The word is dig plus -er, and it has meant a person who digs since Middle English. The machine took the name in the twentieth century, as tools generally do — the person comes first and the machine inherits.
Middle English
dyggar
English, today
digger
From Middle English dyggar, equivalent to dig + -er. In the sense of "Australian soldier", attributed to the considerable time that soldiers spent digging trenches during World War I.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA