Dictionary

nibbler en · NOUN

Etymology

From nibble + -er.

Meanings

1. Someone who nibbles (in various senses).
   • The dog's lean, powerful body dashed down the hill. When the dust of his violence cleared, a sea of dirty white backs was wobbling up the hill, a black-and-white quickness darting now here, now there, straightening the line, hurrying a nibbler, urging a straggler. 1944, Emily Carr, The House of All Sorts, Chapter:
   • But whether unripe years did want conceit, / Or he refused to take her figured proffer, / The tender nibbler would not touch the bait, / But smile and jest at every gentle offer: 1599, anonymous author, “Sweet Cytherea, sitting by a brook”, in The Passionate Pilgrim:
   • 1949, Guiding Family Spending, U.S. Department of Agriculture Miscellaneous Publication No. 661, p. 10, https://books.google.ca/books?id=wxsuAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false In carrying out a spending plan, accounts are usually most important for controlling small recurring expenditures as for newspapers, magazines, tobacco, movies, soft drinks, ice cream, and meals eaten out. Many families look upon these as incidentals and may treat them as unimportant. But they may be nibblers, eating away day by day money that is wanted for other things.
2. A tool for cutting sheet metal.
3. A fish of the sea chub subfamily Girellinae.
4. (historical) A program for copying floppy disks at a low level (typically one bit at a time) to circumvent protection systems.
   • A-Copier. MegaSoft, Ltd. Full Featured Nibbler. 1988, The Software Encyclopedia, volume 2, page 688:
   • We used a program call Fast Hack 'Em. It had what was called a 'Nibbler'. It had the copy protection schemes for various games stored on one of the program disks, and you would load that up before copying the game. It then 'nibbled' away the protection from the data as it was copied. a. 2005, Kleener (Internet forum user) quoted in 2005, Fiona Macmillan, New Directions in Copyright Law (page 234)

Forms

Deriveds

bit nibbler

Translations (4)

fr grignoteuse (tool) · fr grignoteuse (someone who nibbles) · fr grignoteur (someone who nibbles) · grc τρώκτης (someone who nibbles)