ditchdigger
Americannoun
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a worker whose occupation is digging ditches, especially with pick and shovel.
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a person engaged in exhausting manual work, especially work that requires little or no originality.
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Also called ditcher, trencher. a power excavating machine designed to remove earth in a continuous line and to a predetermined width and depth, as by means of a rotating belt equipped with scoops.
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of ditchdigger
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
He was active in his high school drama club and majored in speech and drama at the University of Toledo, where he worked as a ditchdigger to pay for his education.
From Washington Post • Jun. 13, 2022
In the film, Rogen plays Herschel Greenbaum, a struggling ditchdigger who flees his Eastern European shtetl in 1919 for a better life in America.
From New York Times • Aug. 5, 2020
At the same time, thousands of the union members displaced by automation have been forced to take any sort of job they can get, whether it be dishwasher or ditchdigger.
From Time Magazine Archive
Neither planner nor architect nor lawyer nor legislator, just a self-described "senior ditchdigger," he was at once utterly pragmatic and utterly visionary.
From Time Magazine Archive
And he who is confused, be he ditchdigger or dictator, is a man emotionally upset.
From Expediter by Reynolds, Mack
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
