From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishexcavatorex‧ca‧va‧tor /ˈekskəveɪtə $ -ər/ noun [countable] 1 TTC British English a large machine that digs and moves earth and soil SYN steam shovel American English2 SXsomeone who digs to find things that have been buried under the ground for a long time
Examples from the Corpus
excavator• Many different excavators, when digging up the airport, have encountered this odor.• The early excavators of Knossos found the large Horns of Consecration lying precisely in front of this doorway.• The iron ore is easily extracted by quarrying with giant excavators.• As well as its own peat-cutting operations, the company is also encouraging local farmers to use mechanical excavators to exploit their own reserves.• In this case it is clear that the original excavators included only those coins which they deemed of sufficient importance for publication.• Many corpses, or rather fossils of corpses, were found by the excavators in the ash.• Now, with dynamite, the excavators were nibbling back each outcrop farther and farther away from the center.• The excavator also recovered a blue shawl of loosely spaced plain weave with red stripes. 