Harvester

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A machine or person that gathers crops from fields when they are ripe and ready to be collected
2. A mechanical or human agent that efficiently collects crops from agricultural land at the appropriate stage for yield
3. A device or individual that collects mature crops from agricultural fields when they are ripe for optimal harvesting

Etymology: The agent suffix in "harvester" is older and more widely travelled than the word it is attached to. The "-er" comes down through Old English "-ere" and Middle English "-ere" from the Latin "-arius", a suffix for people or things connected with a task, which entered Germanic as "-ārijaz" in Proto-Germanic. That same ending reached English in a second wave through Old French "-ier", so the English suffix has two routes that merged into one spelling. The base, "harvest", is a simple compound-free noun of the same Germanic stock as the Old English word for the autumn season. Adding "-er" to it produced a word for whoever or whatever does the reaping, and the sense has since extended from people working in the fields to the mechanical reapers that replaced them.

Synonyms: reaper, gatherer, collector, picker, farmer