Other forms: miners
A miner is someone whose job is digging things out of the ground — coal, gold, salt, copper. A lamp on the helmet, a cage dropping down the shaft, a face black with dust at the end of the shift.
Miners work underground, and that is what separates them from quarry workers out in the open air. The words around the job are worth having together: the mine is the place, the shaft is the vertical hole, the seam is the layer of coal, and a mining town is a town that exists because of the pit. Whole regions, strikes and songs are built on it — the miners' strike, the miners' union. Computing has borrowed the word as well: a crypto miner runs machines that grind through calculations to earn coins. And watch the spelling, because a minor is something small or a person under eighteen, and the two sound identical.
Miner is as plain as it looks: mine plus -er, the ending that turns an action into the person who does it, the way bake gives baker and teach gives teacher. The hole in the ground was named first, and the person was named after the hole.
Middle English
min
English
mine
English, today
miner
From mine + -er or er. mine comes from Middle English min. From Middle English min, myn, from Old English mīn, from Proto-West Germanic mīn, from Proto-Germanic mīnaz, from Proto-Indo-European méynos. Cognate with stq mien, West Frisian myn, Dutch mijn, Low German mien, German mein, Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish min, Faroese and Icelandic mín.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA