archer

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. One that shoots with a bow and arrow.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. One who uses a bow; a bowman; specifically, in medieval Europe, one who shot with the longbow (which see) and shaft, as distinguished from an arbalister or crossbowman. In Greek art the archer is generally represented in Oriental dress and armor, and the use of the bow by a native Greek in war is rarely mentioned; but one of the two bowmen of the Ægina temple is dressed and armed as a Greek, and on a Basilicatan vase at Naples (Heydemann, No. 922), of good Greek work, a painting represents three youths, evidently Greeks, shooting with bows and arrows at a cock on a column. Among the Romans archers are rarely mentioned. Throughout the middle ages the archers formed an important part of the armies of Europe; but, as they were drawn wholly from the peasants and townspeople, the nobility and their retainers were often suspicious of them, and the free use of the bow among the common people was often discouraged. In some countries, too, the arbalist was so much preferred that the longbow came little into use. In England large bodies of archers were furnished by towns and counties to the royal armies, and were armed with some degree of uniformity with the steel cap, the gambeson or hauberk, and a short double-edged sword, besides bow and quiver. There is no record of mounted archers in the English armies, but they were common on the continent; the dukes of Burgundy maintained large bodies of them, and King Charles VII. of France had a body-guard of mounted men armed with brigantine or gambeson, and carrying a longbow. From this last organization the name archers came to be applied to the body-guard of one of the later kings of France, whose weapon was the harquebuse, which replaced the bow and shafts, and (until the Revolution) to the watchmen or guards of the French cities.
2. n. Same as archer-fish.
3. n. The constellation Sagittarius.
4. n. A Persian gold coin, the daric, bearing the figure of an archer.

Wiktionary

1. n. One who shoots an arrow from a bow or a bolt from a crossbow.
2. adj. comparative form of arch: more arch

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. A bowman, one skilled in the use of the bow and arrow.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. (astrology) a person who is born while the sun is in Sagittarius
2. n. a person who is expert in the use of a bow and arrow
3. n. the ninth sign of the zodiac; the sun is in this sign from about November 22 to December 21