gardener

From Middle English gardener, either calqued or loaned from Anglo-Norman and Old Northern French gardinier.

See garden, and compare German Gärtner (“gardener”), which is equivalent to a derivative of the German cognate to English garden, Garten (“garden”), + -er.

Displaced native Old English wyrtweard.

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈɡɑɹd.n̩.ɚ/, /ˈɡɑɹd.nɚ/
• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈɡɑːd.n̩.ə/, /ˈɡɑːd.nə/

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• Hyphenation: gar‧den‧er

gardener (plural gardeners)

1. One who gardens; one who grows plants or cultivates a garden.

   "Ponder the fact that God has made you a gardener, to root out vice and to plant virtue." — St. Catherine of Siena

   • 1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XIX, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:

     At the far end of the houses the head gardener stood waiting for his mistress, and he gave her strips of bass to tie up her nosegay. This she did slowly and laboriously, with knuckly old fingers that shook.

2. (slang, obsolete, derogatory) A coachman who drives badly.
   • 2014, Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, page 329:

     Get on, gardener! Get on, you slow and clumsy coachman. The allusion is to a man who is both gardener and coachman.

• (coachman): John Camden Hotten (1873) The Slang Dictionary

• deranger, garnered, rangered

• gardenere, gardyner, gardynere, gardiner, garthener, garthynere

From Old Northern French gardinier; equivalent to gardyn +‎ -er.

• IPA^(key): /ɡarˈdinər(ə)/, /ˈɡardənər(ə)/

gardener (plural gardineris)

1. gardener (one who tends a garden)
2. (figurative) A tender of one's heart.

• English: gardener
• Scots: gairdener, gairdner, gairner

• “gardiner, n.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007, retrieved 2018-06-16.