eager beaver
3
6.1
- noun
- /ˈiːɡər ˈbiːvər/
- Informal
:
trabajador entusiasta
- At the office, John is known as the eager beaver because he always stays late to finish projects ahead of schedule.
I was just, I was just, you know, eager Beaver with a laptop.
- I was just, I was just, you know, eager Beaver with a laptop.
Examples
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"Oh-ho, an eager beaver here," I replied.
Fiction book (2002) -
He grins at Actor #1, aka Paul Marco, a young eager beaver who's loyal like a dog.
Fiction book (1994) -
This is... ...a brief... ...written by an eager-beaver law student.
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Sure is an eager beaver, sir.
-
Maybe I am a dumb rookie and an eager beaver, ok?
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Well, ain't you two a pair of eager beavers.
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Look at that beach, swarming with eager beavers.
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You know, I can remember the days when you would have scurried over here like an eager beaver.
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Here comes the eager beaver with a bloodshot gleam in his eye.
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But Ophelia was an eager beaver, and everything, as Molly's mother put it, could become grist to her mill.
Fiction book (1995)
Synonyms
18
5.0
A person who works very hard and gets better results than expected at school or work
3
2.9
A person who always works hard and stays active
1
6.2
A very active person who works hard and gets many things done
1
5.8
A person who works very hard at their job
Antonyms
How Enthusiastic
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is partly derivable because 'eager' (keen) combined with 'beaver' evokes the animal's industriousness, so a learner who recognizes the animal metaphor can infer 'an enthusiastic, hardworking person.' However, the figurative collocation relies on cultural/encyclopedic knowledge that beavers symbolize hard work and is an idiomatic nickname rather than a strictly compositional phrase, so many B1 learners would not predict the exact sense from the constituents alone.
Etymology
Eager beaver comes from the busy image of the beaver, an animal that works hard building dams, and the word eager meaning ready and excited. One popular story says people compared energetic workers to that busy animal, so today eager beaver means 'very eager and hard-working'.