1A person, animal, or large machine that digs earth.

1. 1.1 A miner.
   Example sentencesExamples

   • It continued to do so for a long time even though many diggers preferred to sell their gold in Adelaide or Melbourne where it commanded a higher price.
   • However, such placers became exhausted very quickly, and diggers did not have the equipment or money to mine deeper layers.
   • After they had delivered the gold they would sit on the grass and hand over any letters they might have had from the diggers.
   • More than three hundred diggers sold their gold, at a much better price than they had received from the Victorians, and in March the Gold Escort was on its way back to Adelaide.
   • Its late-nineteenth-century exponents celebrated the convicts, diggers, and bush workers as bearers of a tradition of egalitarian, masculine solidarity.
   • When the alluvial gold had petered out the family left, as did all the other diggers, and settled in Port Augusta.
   • As many of the returned diggers were in a generous mood, it enabled him to finish his chapel at Sevenhill in 1856.
   • By 1888 he had created an effective monopoly through his company, which displaced smaller companies as well as white and black diggers.
   • Among the various carry-ons under discussion were on-screen trenches not meeting health and safety requirements and diggers being advised by programme makers to get agents.
   • First colonised, this place was home to the miners, diggers and low tech engineers that made up the colonisation crews, see?
   • After these goldrushes, and the return of experienced, but mostly unsuccessful diggers, gold, copper, and silver mines were in production within a short time.
   • Apart from the hundreds of claims pegged out by individual diggers, there were several claims being worked in earnest by companies.
   • But there was a problem - six metres down the men had come across a pocket of natural gas - overcoming and hospitalising one of the diggers.
   • It was a barren grassland dotted with farms but soon grew into a shanty town surrounded by mine dumps as the diggers went deeper and deeper.
   • A ten-year boom brought diggers back across the Pacific from the declining California field, as well as from Britain, where Cornish tin-mining was declining.
   • He remembers the clay flats being mined, the diggers shovelling up clay into the oxcarts, the beasts relishing the mud.
   • He watched the excited diggers, who wanted to be diggers no more, climb atop great piles of coal, a new kind of black gold, and wave to those they never even bothered to exchange names with as the wagon train pulled out of camp.
   • Later his teams carried desperately needed supplies for the starving diggers at Milparinka.
2. 1.2 A person who excavates archaeological sites.
   考古发掘者
   Example sentencesExamples

   • In the early stages of a housing development in the village of Bleadon (near Weston Super Mare), diggers unearthed several ancient circular burial pits.
   • As an aside to its fundraising campaign, the Sussex Archaeological Society is inviting the 1960s diggers to a reunion on 22 May - all 800 of them.
   • By then the volunteer team of diggers, guides, museum attendants and receptionists had formed into the Nonsuch and Ewell Antiquarian Society.
   • And I turned round to the other diggers and said, Right who's going to excavate this?
   • I read with interest the letter on problems for inexperienced diggers.
   • Streamed videos from our interactive TV coverage (eg interviews with diggers and a look behind the scenes in the control room) and highlights from the shows will also be in view.
   • Turned down, as it only really applies to land-based diggers, was ‘a bent’ of archaeologists.
   • Summer schools could be used to offer practical experience on sites looking for inexperienced diggers.
   • The first thing he did was hire a digger and spent a day or so excavating the foundations.
   • Were the diggers moved by these poignant finds to hold their own ceremonies?
   • He also announced on the same occasion that a new mass grave had been found and that it contained 500 bodies, although diggers at the site claimed to have found only two bodies.
   • It is all there, gathered where everyone from project manager to diggers can consult at will.
   • The publication reported last month how diggers excavating the site near Pocklington unearthed fragments of a human skeleton which almost certainly dated back to Roman times.
   • There are a number of diggers and excavators on site.
   • As well as the picture of the Maori warrior, the diggers have also uncovered a rua, which is a large bowl-shaped underground storage structure.

2A member of a group of radical dissenters formed in England in 1649 as an offshoot of the Levellers, believing in a form of agrarian communism in which common land would be made available to the poor.

3Australian NZ informal A man, especially a private soldier (often used as a friendly form of address)

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