worker
Pluralworkers
- 1A person who works, especially one who does paid work for a living, traditionally manual labor.
A skilled worker can earn a solid wage in the building trades.
Construction workers arrived at the site well before sunrise.
UsageOften after a word for the job or place: factory worker, social worker. A hard worker is someone who works hard.
Similarlaborer, employee, workman, hand
Oppositeemployer
Note
The King James Bible of 1611 shows its wider reach: the "workers of iniquity" are simply people who do evil, with no wages involved. Today the word leans toward paid labor and sits close to employee, though worker names the doing rather than the hiring.
- 2A member of a colony of social insects such as ants, bees, termites or wasps that usually does not reproduce but gathers food, builds and cares for the young.
A single worker can travel hundreds of feet from the nest in search of food.
In a beehive, the workers feed the larvae and guard the entrance.
UsageOften before the insect's name: a worker ant, a worker bee.
- 3A thread or process that a program runs to carry out tasks, often in the background or in parallel, usually taking jobs one after another from a queue.
Each worker pulls a job from the queue and processes it independently.
The server spawns several workers to handle incoming requests in parallel.
Note
Programmers borrowed the workplace image: a program hands out jobs, and workers take them on one at a time. The usual verb is spawn, so a client might spawn a worker for each file it uploads. Workers are often kept in a managed pool, so several tasks run at once without the cost of creating and destroying threads over and over. Thread or process names the mechanism, while worker names the job it is doing.
Checked 5 Nov 2026 · 3 facts
- In a worker pool, workers execute assigned tasks sequentially. nodejs.org
- Managed pools allow multiple tasks to execute concurrently. docs.python.org
- Reusing worker threads reduces thread creation and destruction overhead. docs.oracle.com
Practice
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Origin
"Work" plus the suffix "-er" gave Middle English werkere, also spelled worcher or wercher. It pushed out the older word "wright", which goes back to Old English wyrhta.