go·fer

[goh-fer]
noun Slang.
an employee whose chief duty is running errands.
Also, go-fer, gopher.

Origin:
1965–70; respelling of go for (verb phrase), with -er representing both vowel reduction in for and -er1

Can be confused: gofer, gopher.
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2013.
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Collins
World English Dictionary
gofer (ˈɡəʊfə) [Click for IPA pronunciation guide]
 
—n
slang chiefly (US), (Canadian) an employee or assistant whose duties include menial tasks such as running errands
 
[C20: originally US: alteration of go for]

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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00:10
Gofer is always a great word to know.
So is callithumpian. Does it mean:
a children's mummer's parade, as on the Fourth of July, with prizes for the best costumes.
a fool or simpleton; ninny.
LEARN MORE UNUSUAL WORDS WITH WORD DYNAMO...
Etymonline
Word Origin & History

gofer
1956, Amer.Eng. coinage from go for (coffee, spare parts, etc.), with a pun on gopher.
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper
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Slang Dictionary

gopher definition

[ˈgofɚ]
and gofer
  1. n.
    someone who goes for things and brings them back. (From go for.) : You got a gopher who can go get some coffee?
  2. n.
    a dupe; a pawn; an underling. : The guy's just a gofer. He has no say in anything.
Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions by Richard A. Spears.Fourth Edition.
Copyright 2007. Published by McGraw Hill.
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FOLDOC
Computing Dictionary

Gofer definition

language
A lazy functional language designed by Mark Jones at the Programming Research Group, Oxford, UK in 1991. It is very similar to Haskell 1.2. It has lazy evaluation, higher order functions, pattern matching, and type classes, lambda, case, conditional and let expressions, and wild card, "as" and irrefutable patterns. It lacks modules, arrays and standard classes.
Gofer comes with an interpreter (in C), a compiler which compiles to C, documentation and examples. Unix Version 2.30 (1994-06-10) Mac_Gofer version 0.16 beta. Ported to Sun, Acorn Archimedes, IBM PC, Macintosh, Atari, Amiga.
Version 2.30 added support for contexts in datatype and member function definitions, Haskell style arrays, an external function calling mechanism for gofc, an experimental implementation of Launchbury/Peyton Jones style lazy functional state threads, an experimental implementation of "do" notation for monad comprehensions.
Latest version: HUGS.
["Introduction to Gofer 2.20", M.P. Jones.]
[The implementation of the Gofer functional programming system, Mark P. Jones, Research Report YALEU/DCS/RR-1030, Yale University, Department of Computer Science, May 1994. FTP: nebula.cs.yale.edu/pub/yale-fp/reports].
(http://cs.nott.ac.uk/Department/Staff/mpj/).
FTP Yale (ftp://nebula.cs.yale.edu/), FTP Glasgow (ftp://ftp.dcs.glasgow.ac.uk/), FTP Chalmers (ftp://ftp.cs.chalmers.se/pub/haskell/gofer/).
(1995-02-14)

The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, © Denis Howe 2010 http://foldoc.org
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Example sentences
My role at the firm was-not to put too fine a point on it-that of professional gofer.
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gopher
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