| 1. | a suffix used in forming nouns designating persons from the object of their occupation or labor (hatter; tiler; tinner; moonshiner), or from their place of origin or abode (Icelander; southerner; villager), or designating either persons or things from some special characteristic or circumstance (six-footer; three-master; teetotaler; fiver; tenner). |
| 2. | a suffix serving as the regular English formative of agent nouns, being attached to verbs of any origin (bearer; creeper; employer; harvester; teacher; theorizer). |
| a noun suffix occurring in loanwords from French in the Middle English period, most often names of occupations (archer; butcher; butler; carpenter; grocer; mariner; officer), but also other nouns (corner; danger; primer). Some historical instances of this suffix, as in banker or gardener, where the base is a recognizable modern English word, are now indistinguishable from denominal formations with -er1, as miller or potter. |
| a termination of nouns denoting action or process: dinner; rejoinder; remainder; trover. |
| a suffix regularly used in forming the comparative degree of adjectives: harder; smaller. |
| a suffix regularly used in forming the comparative degree of adverbs: faster. |
| a formal element appearing in verbs having frequentative meaning: flicker; flutter; shiver; shudder. |
| a suffix that creates informal or jocular mutations of more neutral words, which are typically clipped to a single syllable if polysyllabic, before application of the suffix, and which sometimes undergo other phonetic alterations: bed-sitter; footer; fresher; rugger. Most words formed thus have been limited to English public-school and university slang; few, if any, have become current in North America, with the exception of soccer, which has also lost its earlier informal character. |
| -er 1 suff.
[Middle English, partly from Old English -ere (from Germanic *-ārjaz, from Latin -ārius, -ary), partly from Anglo-French -er (from Old French -ier, from Latin -ārius) and partly from Old French -ere, -eor; see -or1.] |
| -er 2 suff. Used to form the comparative degree of adjectives and adverbs: darker; faster. [Middle English, from Old English -re, -ra.] |
