fresher

Pluralfreshers

1. 1
   adjective

   Comparative of fresh.

   Milk delivered each morning is noticeably fresher than cartons left on a shelf.

   The sea air felt fresher once the storm had cleared the haze.

   Note

   An ordinary comparative, built by adding -er to fresh. It compares along whichever sense of fresh is in play: fresher bread is less stale, fresher air is cooler and more bracing, and a fresher runner is less tired. The same spelling is also a noun with a separate history, a clipping of freshman. So a fresher is a person, while fresher after a verb or before than is the adjective.

2. 2
   nounBritishcountable

   A student in their first year of study at a university.

   The fresher struggled to find her lecture hall on the very first day.

   Most freshers join at least one society during their first term.

   Similarfreshman, first-year

   Note

   A piece of British student slang, made the way Oxford slang makes words: freshman is clipped to fresh, and a playful -er is added. Freshman remains the standard form elsewhere, and especially in American English, so choosing fresher marks the speaker as British. It is purely a noun, unrelated in origin to the comparative adjective despite the identical spelling.

3. 3
   nounIndiacountable

   A recent graduate who is searching for his or her first job.

   As a fresher, she applied for dozens of positions before landing an interview.

   Many freshers accept lower starting salaries to gain early experience.

   Note

   Indian English takes the student word one step further, from the first year of college to the first year of work. The newcomer here is entering the job market, so the word belongs to hiring talk, where a fresher is set against a candidate with experience. Readers elsewhere may take it as the British first-year student, so in international writing recent graduate is the safer choice.

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