[f. LASH v.1, 2 + -ER1.] One who or that which lashes.
† 1. One who beats or whips. Also fig.
1602. B. Jonson, Poetaster, Apol. Dial., Wks. (1616), 352. Or I could doe worse, Arm’d with Archilochvs fury, write Iambicks, Should make the desperate lashers hang themselues.
1611. Cotgr., Foüetteur, a whipper, scourger … lasher.
2. In the names of fishes, e.g., lasher bull-head. Also FATHER-LASHER.
1867. Smyth, Sailor’s Word-bk., Lasher bull-head, a name for the fish Cottus scorpius.
3. Naut. (See quot. 1848.) = LASHING vbl. sb.2
1669. Sturmy, Mariner’s Mag., I. 20. Make ready to board him; Have your Lashers clear, and able men with them.
1711. W. Sutherland, Shipbuild. Assist., 143. Lashers for the Yards as big as the Lanyards of the Shrowds.
1848. G. Biddlecombe, Art of Rigging, 20. Lashers.—-The ropes employed to lash or secure particular objects; as jeers, etc.
4. Chiefly local (on the Thames). The body of water that lashes or rushes over an opening in a barrier or weir; hence the opening itself, and by extension, a weir.
1677. Plot, Oxfordsh., 185. Our Mills and Locks have most of them back streams and lashers to carry off the water when it is too plentiful.
1800. Hurdis, Fav. Village, 96. Not louder falls The foamy lasher’s cataract superb In fullest flood-time.
1840. Ann. Reg., 15. The lasher is an opening to let off the water when too high.
1858. Hughes, Scouring White Horse, 16. The great lasher at Pangbourn, where the water was rushing and dancing through in the sunlight.
1884. Blackw. Mag., March, 342/1. The huge rafts of silver fir, which float down in great numbers, shoot the lashers in safety.
b. The pool into which the water of the lasher falls.
1851. G. Butler, Lett., in Recoll. (1892), 70. I bathed in a lasher about four miles from Oxford.
1853. M. Arnold, Scholar-Gipsy, x. Men who through these wide fields of breezy grass … To bathe in the abandon’d lasher pass.
1861. Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxf., II. xii. 232. He sculled down to Sandford, bathed in the lasher, and returned in time for chapel.
1872. Daily News, 3 May, 5/3. If the … Board can prevent bathing in these dangerous lashers it ought to do so without delay.
