gopher

See also: Gopher

English

Pocket gopher (1)

Pronunciation

  • (UK) IPA(key): /ˈɡəʊfə/
  • Audio (Southern England):(file)
  • (US) IPA(key): /ˈɡoʊfɚ/
  • Rhymes: -əʊfə(ɹ)

Etymology 1

Perhaps an adaptation of Cajun French gaufre (literally “honeycomb, waffle”), based on the analogy of holes in the ground to the indentations in a honeycomb or a waffle (doublet of waffle).[1][2] Alternatively, from Muskogean.[3]

Noun

gopher (plural gophers)

  1. A small burrowing rodent native to North and Central America, especially in the family Geomyidae (pocket gophers).
    Hyponym: pocket gopher
  2. A ground squirrel (Marmotinae spp.).
  3. A gopher tortoise (Gopherus spp.).
  4. A gopher rockfish (Sebastes carnatus).
  5. (programming, slang) A Go programmer.
    • 2017, Lex Sheehan, Learning Functional Programming in Go, Packt Publishing Ltd, →ISBN, page 373:
      I'm not at all advocating for any Gophers to switch to Haskell—there are far too many reasons to keep coding and deploying Go solutions to address here.
Alternative forms
Derived terms
Descendants
  • → Catalan: gòfer
  • → Polish: goffer
Translations

See also

Etymology 2

Noun

gopher (plural gophers)

  1. Alternative spelling of gofer (“worker who runs errands”).
    • 2015 March 12, Bill Mann, “The film that makes me cry: Local Hero”, in The Guardian‎[1], London: Guardian News & Media, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 18 October 2026:
      Crackpot Texan oil magnate Felix Happer (Burt Lancaster) gets the idea that a small Scottish fishing village would be a marvellous acquisition for his so-rich-it-makes-you-sick company, Knox Oil and Gas, so he sends an executive gopher named MacIntyre (because that sounds Scottish, yeah – played by Peter Riegert) to close the deal and get the pipeline pencilled in.

Further reading

References

  1. ^ Douglas Harper (2001–2026), “gopher”, in Online Etymology Dictionary.
  2. ^ “gopher”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
  3. ^ “gopher”, in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th edition, Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016, →ISBN.
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