pecker

1. Someone who or something that pecks, striking or piercing in the manner of a bird's beak or bill, particularly:Examples: "Two studies of British civil servants, for example, suggest that those at the top of the heap are less stressed than those near the bottom. Work on other species, too, indicates that when it comes to pecking orders, the peckees are more stressed than the peckers."

2. Someone who or something that pecks, striking or piercing in the manner of a bird's beak or bill, particularly:Examples: "The women with short peckers or parers,... of a foote long and about fiue inches in breadth: doe onely breake the vpper part of the ground to rayse vp the weedes, grasse, & old stubbes of corne stalkes with their rootes... For their corne,... with a pecker they make a hole, wherein they put foure graines."; "Let sturdy youths their pointed peckers ply, Till the rais'd roots loose on the surface lie."; "A small narrow hoe or pecker... A small hand-pecker."regionaluncommon

3. Someone who or something that pecks, striking or piercing in the manner of a bird's beak or bill, particularly:Examples: "The upper end of the finger o carries a "pecker" p, which consists of a hardened steel piece with a V edge. This pecker is engaged by any one of several steps or notches in a stepped block m carried by the rocking lever l."uncommon

4. Someone who or something that pecks, striking or piercing in the manner of a bird's beak or bill, particularly:Examples: "The shuttle... receives its motion from the peckers connected with cords pulled by the pecking lever."; "When the shaft [of the draw-boy] rocks from side to side of the machine, it will carry the pecker... with it."obsoleteuncommon

5. Someone who or something that pecks, striking or piercing in the manner of a bird's beak or bill, particularly:Examples: "Click, click, click, the pecker is at work."; "Pecker, the small cylindrical pin which rises and falls in scanning the holes punched in a slip corresponding to the coding of the message."historicaluncommon

6. Someone who or something that pecks, striking or piercing in the manner of a bird's beak or bill, particularly:Examples: "Rice mills, called pecker, cog, and water mills... The first... so called, from the pestle's striking... in the manner of a wood pecker."; "After being thrashed by flail or whipped off, the rice was milled and dressed wholly by hand or by a crude machine called a ‘pecker’."USabbreviationalt-ofclippinghistoricalregionaluncommon