musher
UK /ˈmʌʃə/ · US /ˈmʌʃəɹ/ noun
Forms mushers
- noun One who drives a dogsled over ice and snow; specifically, one who participates in a dogsled race.
- noun One who travels over snow, chiefly by dogsled but also by foot.
- noun (chiefly London, slang) Synonym of mush (“a cab driver who is the owner of their cab, and sometimes a small number of other cabs as well”).
- noun (England, dialectal, chiefly Hampshire) A mushroom.
Synonyms
Etymology
From mush (“to drive dogs, usually pulling a sled, across snow”) + -er (suffix forming agent nouns). Mush is probably derived from French marche or marchons, respectively the second-person singular and first-person plural imperative forms of marcher (“to move; to travel; to walk”), from Proto-Germanic *markōną (“to mark; to notice”), from *marką (“mark; sign; stamp”), possibly related to *markō (“border, boundary; area, region”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *merǵ- (“(noun) border, boundary, edge; (verb) to divide”).
Origin uncertain, possibly from mush (“cab driver who is the owner of their cab, and sometimes a small number of other cabs as well”) + -er (suffix forming agent nouns), although the word is attested slightly earlier than mush. Mush is possibly derived from mush (“to drive dogs, usually pulling a sled, across snow”, verb) (see etymology 1), or mush (“(slang, rare) umbrella”, noun) (a clipping of mushroom, from the similar appearance; referring to drivers shielding passengers with umbrellas in rainy weather).
Clipping of musher(oom) or musher(oon), variants of mushroom.
Sources: Wiktionary — from the Wiktionary entry “musher”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details