A British dialectal term for the woodpecker, found in regional English dialects. The name is presumably onomatopoeic or descriptive — 'nicker' may imitate a pecking or tapping sound, and 'pecker' directly describes the bird's characteristic behavior of pecking at wood. British English has numerous regional folk names for the woodpecker (including 'yaffle,' 'green woodpecker,' 'hickwall'), and 'nickerpecker' is one of the more obscure variants, likely confined to a specific geographic area. Primarily of dialectological interest.
The old gamekeeper called it a nickerpecker — a name none of the visiting birdwatchers had ever heard before.
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(UK, dialect) A woodpecker .
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Regional slang from around the English-speaking world — British, Australian, Irish, Caribbean, Nigerian, Filipino, AAVE, and the hyphenated-English dialects that make the internet sound local.
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