DCHP-1 Online

settler

• 1 n. a person who settles in a new country or in another part of the same country, usually on the frontier.

  • 1755  (1895)  In order to save as many of the Acadian cattle as possible, I have given some of them among such of the English settlers as have the means of feeding them.
  • 1852  Although the upper part hasn't as yet any settlers upon it, a great many clearings are to be found on the lower part.
  • 1960  The settlers called them "dugouts."

• 2a n. Lab. See quote.

  • 1947  The resident white fishermen of the outer coast are mostly known under the title liveyeres, a West of England word supposed to be a corruption of "live here". On the southern coast a distinction is also made between liveyeres, English-speaking, semi-settled fishermen[,] and habitants, semi-settled fishermen who speak French. The former are also termed "planters" or "settlers."
  • 1964  But since the Labrador settlers . . . have always lived with and worked alongside Eskimos, there was not the antagonism that might have occurred in a white community "outside" if 150 strangers had suddenly moved in with them.

• 2b n. See quote 1947.

  • 1947  . . . the term "settler" [for livyer] should be eliminated because it may give rise to confusion; in the coastal district north of Makkovik this is the term given to some semi-settled half-breeds of white and Eskimo.
  • 1959  Hopedale--[Labrador, has] about 200 people. Very few, if any, are pure Eskimo, nearly all are "Settlers," mainly Eskimo speaking, but most can speak English.

• 3 n. a small farmer and part-time logger and trapper in Northern Ontario, especially a French-speaking Canadian.

  See also: colonist (def. 3)  

  • 1963  The farmers' hold on the land is so tenuous [because of poverty] that even though some have been here [N.Ont.] thirty years, they are still called "settlers."