What do you call someone who excels at setting and disarming traps?

Question

Alright, I'm going to just start by saying there probably isnt an equivalent for this, but here is pretty much my line of thought. If you need someone to unlock a door for you, you call a 'locksmith'. Now, suppose you needed someone to disarm or even set traps for you, whether it is for animal hunting, or pest control, you would call a _______?

Words that I can think of: "Hunter", "Trapper".

Is there a professional single word name for people like this? Even an archaic one?

Example sentence: "We needed to trick the dragon, so xxx, an experienced ______, set out to rig a trap in the next room."

Answer 1

If you're talking about animals and not all forms of traps employed against humans, you already answered your question with the most common word:

trapper

although @Traktor53 pointed out that specialists will call themselves X-catchers. (It's got a more positive spin on it than its synonyms X-trapper and X-hunter, since an X-hunter may have gone their entire life without, y'know, actually catching an X at all and an X-trapper's prey may have always escaped after being trapped.) If you want to coin your own word but want it to have some connection to English etymology, there's

• trapsmith (who would build traps to sell to other people but not use them herself),

• engineer (from an obsolete sense of engine as "An instance of artful trickery"), which could be distinguished by the obsolete or Scottish spelling ingineer,

• awaiter (from await, obs., "An ambush, a trap, a plot"),

• fanger (from fang, arch., "To grasp, to catch; to trap"),

• stamper or stalper (from stamp, dial., "A trap"),

• illaqueator (from Latin illaqueare, "To ensnare"), esp. with rope traps,

• swarler or swarrer (from swarl, "To trap"),

• swiker (from swike, obs., "A trick; a trap"),

• braker, briker, or bryker (from brake, obs., "A trap"), and

• panter or panther (orig. from Latin panthera, "A net for catching birds", but with a wider sense in English inclusive of treasonous plots).

There are some others even more misleading than engineer and braker, like lacer, latcher, leasher, puppy-snatcher, snarler, wirer, based on obsolete senses of those words. Again, you could create specialist terms like hutcher (an employer of hutches or "box-traps"), pitcher and picher (a setter of pitches or "fishtraps"), gnarer (a setter of choking traps), shraper (a setter of food-lure traps), and grinner or graner (an employer of grins or "rope-and-noose foot-traps"). The last could also be known as a swickler, after the noose itself. 'Kill-'em-all-and-let-God-sort-'em-out' is an exterminator.

As far as someone able to set mantraps, well, there is man-catcher (further buttressing Traktor's point) but for the most part people are a complicated lot and there are hordes of different skill-sets involving everything from rangers and commandos acting as ambushers to demolition experts variously blowing things up or stopping them from doing so to seductresses playing the part of a honeypot.

Side point: squire-trap for a bog or other soft piece of ground to catch the English landed gentry as they attempt to bother foxes is delightful and needs more usage.

Answer 2

See if snarer holds some value. It is defined here at vocabulary.com as

someone who sets snares for birds or small animals.

Though a dragon is huge, I'm sure a snarer will figure something out. Why not, I mean he is just setting trap for a big bird that breathes fire and has an indestructible integument.

Answer 3

"catcher" could be an alternative to "trapper" or "hunter" and, using "rat-catcher" as the basis of its etymology, could be extended to describe an experienced "dragon-catcher".

catcher: A person or thing that catches something. (ODO)

rat-catcher: (medieval profession) A person who practices catching rats (ODO, Wikipedia, the Concise Oxford Dictionary, or do a web search for "profession rat catcher").)

In common with "hunter" and "trapper" you may need to assume that catchers are expert in dismantling their own traps: I doubt there will be a "dragon trap disposal expert" professional position unless held by a dragon :-)

Answer 4

nimrod

(noun)

A skilful hunter.

‘nimrods take to the field after everything from prairie dogs to grizzly bears’

(OED)

Origin

Late 16th century: from Hebrew Nimrōḏ, the name of the great-grandson of Noah, known for his skill as a hunter (see Gen. 10:8-9).

From Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

Definition of Nimrod

1 : a descendant of Ham represented in Genesis as a mighty hunter and a king of Shinar

2 not capitalized : hunter

3 not capitalized, slang : idiot, jerk

Did You Know?

Nimrod is described in Genesis as "the first on earth to be a mighty man" and "a mighty hunter before the Lord." It's easy to see how people made the leap from one mighty hunter in the Bible to calling any hunter a nimrod. A lesser-known fact is that nimrod has seen some use in English as a noun meaning "tyrant" (apparently, the mighty Nimrod was not reputed to be an especially benevolent king), although that sense is now essentially obsolete. The legendary Nimrod is also sometimes associated with the attempt to build the Tower of Babel. Because the tower resulted in the wrath of the Lord and proved a disastrous idea, nimrod is sometimes used with yet another meaning: "a stupid person."

From Online Etymology Dictionary:

"great hunter," 1712, a reference to the biblical son of Cush, referred to (Genesis x.8-9) as "a mighty hunter before the Lord." It came to mean "geek, klutz" by 1983 in teenager slang, for unknown reasons. (Amateur theories include its occasional use in "Bugs Bunny" cartoon episodes featuring rabbit-hunting Elmer Fudd as a foil; its possible ironic use, among hunters, for a clumsy member of their fraternity; or a stereotype of deer hunters by the non-hunting population in the U.S.