# worker

Pronunciation: US say "WUR-kur" /ˈwɝ.kɚ/; UK say "WUR-kuh" /ˈwɜː.kə/

## Noun

1. A person who works, especially one who does paid work for a living, traditionally manual labor.
   - Simple: A person who works, especially one who does a job to earn money, often with their hands.
   - _A skilled worker can earn a solid wage in the building trades._
   - _Construction workers arrived at the site well before sunrise._
2. A 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.
   - Simple: An ant, bee or similar insect that does the work of the colony, like finding food, and usually does not have 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._
3. A 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.
   - Simple: A part of a computer program that does jobs in the background while other parts keep running.
   - _Each worker pulls a job from the queue and processes it independently._
   - _The server spawns several workers to handle incoming requests in parallel._

## 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.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/worker (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).