pusher

Etymology

From push + -er.

noun

1. Someone or something that pushes.
   Coordinate term: pushee
2. A person employed to push passengers onto trains at busy times, so they can depart on schedule.
3. (military slang) A girl or woman.
   ‘You should a seed some o' the pushers. Girls o' seventeen painted worse nor any Gerties I'd ever knowed.’ 1929, Frederic Manning, The Middle Parts of Fortune, Vintage, published 2014, page 208
4. (colloquial) A drug dealer.
   But the pusher don't care / Ah, if you live or if you die / God damn, the pusher / God damn, I say the pusher 1968, Hoyt Axton (lyrics and music), “The Pusher”, in Steppenwolf, performed by Steppenwolf
5. (aeronautics) An aircraft with the propeller behind the fuselage.
6. A device that one pushes in order to transport a baby while on foot, such as a stroller or pram (as opposed to a carrier such as a front or back pack).
   You have two flights of stairs and no elevator. As you get closer to your due date that will be awkward, and once the baby arrives a pusher would never make it up there. You can hardly carry a fully loaded pram and baby up two flights. 2015, Susanne Hampton, Midwife's Baby Bump, page 160
   Two of the participants even decided to purchase a carrier instead of a pusher as they wanted to “permanently hold their baby”. 2017, Simona Vlad, Nicolae Marius Roman, International Conference on Advancements of Medicine and Health Care through Technology, page 279
7. (tennis) A defensive player who does not attempt to hit winners, instead playing slower shots into the opponent's court.
8. (historical, informal) A tolkach.
   Time-and-motion study meant objective (that is, testable) standards for setting the pace of work so that, when workers complained of speedup, it was now less out of outrage that the foreman was a "pusher" than that the system itself was being violated or manipulated. 1993, Bertram Silverman, Robert C. Vogt, Murray Yanowitch, Double Shift, page 249
   Large factories use “pushers” who cajole, threaten, wine, dine, and bribe those in whose hands rests the power to allocate needed resources, machinery, raw materials, or spare parts. It is often the only way to cross the bureaucratic thicket, […] 2017, Michael Rywkin, Soviet Society Today, page 35
9. (rail transport) Synonym of banker (“type of railway locomotive”)
10. A device in a coke oven for levelling the coal, traditionally operated by a pusherman.