c1400 Prose Versions New Test.: 1 Cor. (Selwyn) (1904) i. 20 Where is þe wyse man? where þe makere of þe lawe? where þe getere [c1384 Wycliffite, E.V. purchasour; L. conquistor] of þe worlde? ne haþ noȝt God mad þe wysdom of þis world folye?

Promptorium Parvulorum (Harl. 221) 192 Getare of goodys, adquisitor.

?1518 A. Barclay tr. D. Mancinus Myrrour Good Maners sig. Hvi Vyle lucre..causeth the getter, oft tyme his purpose ban.

1548 Hall's Vnion: Henry V f. lxxxi Experience teacheth that there is no lesse praise to be geuen to the keper then to the getter.

1596 T. Bell Suruey Popery i. ii. iv. 84 After great getters come great spenders.

1629 J. Gaule Distractions 438 After a great Getter, then commonly comes a Spender.

1659 E. Gayton Art Longevity xxvii. 52 The tarter sort [of cheese] is hot, and burnes, a getter Of extreme thirst.

1667 J. Corbet Disc. Relig. Eng. 25 They are not the Great Wasters, but mostly in the number of Getters.

1707 N. Rowe tr. Golden Verses Pythagoras in A. Dacier Life Pythagoras 157 Revolve the Getter's Joy and Looser's Pain, And think if it be worth thy while to gain.

1799 G. Chalmers Supplemental Apol. Believers in Shakspeare-papers 52 W. H. was the getter of the manuscript, imperfect as it was, from which the Sonnets were printed inaccurately.

1853 R. C. Trench On Lessons in Proverbs 141 Unrighteous gains are sure to disappoint the getter.

1880 L. Wallace Ben-Hur 238 He will have need of getters and keepers.

1947 Kiplinger Mag. May 13/1 Gimbels became known as ‘The getter of the un-gettables’ and the impression was created that the store was beating the britches off Macy's in the battle of ads.

1978 Mother Jones Apr. 69/2 He was a consummate swinger of deals, getter of grants and recipient of fellowships.

2011 Wall St. Jrnl. 8 Oct. a14/5 We are left to raise children in an economy that desperately needs them to become competitive getters and spenders.

1688 R. Holme Acad. Armory iii. iii. f. 71^v A Cutter of Stones a Digger of Stones, such are they as work, in Quarries, Quarry Men, Hewers of Stone, Masons, getters of Stone.

1794 J. Holt Gen. View Agric. Lancaster 40 The number of workmen [in a marl-pit] are six fillers and getters;..one getter is usually sufficient.

1839 A. Ure Dict. Arts 979 (Pitcoal) The set who succeed the holers are called getters.

1873 Trans. Amer. Inst. Mining Engineers 1871–3 1 305 Beginning at the far end of his work the getter knocks out or loosens the sprags that had protected the holers, retreating as he operates.

1883 Manch. Examiner 27 Nov. 5/5 The drawers at the Whinney Hill Pit..struck work for an advance of wages, and, as the getters can do nothing without the drawers, the mine is stopped.

1936 Handbk. Labor Statistics (U.S. Dept. Labor) 772 The rate from influenza and pneumonia among hewers and getters of coal was 44 percent higher in the years 1921-23 than among men of similar social status in England and Wales as a whole.

1995 A. Howard Silence of Strangers (Electronic ed.) The men, the ‘getters’, the kings of the colliery, cut coal stark naked but for a pair of leather pads on their elbows and knees.

1912 Minutes 28th Ann. Convent. Assoc. Edison Illuminating Companies 226 If this glass is very thin the wires squeeze through it and make little leaks through which air can get into the lamp. We had an epidemic of this trouble about 20 years ago and found that a drop of castor oil inside the glass tube would stop this little leak... The name of ‘vacuum getter’ was given to this oil so used. We used this castor oil only a short time on a few lamps, but everything since that time which has a tendency to counteract the evil effects of poor vacuum has been known as vacuum ‘getter’.

1938 Jrnl. Royal Soc. Arts 86 945 Getters used in lamps were obviously limited to substances that produced a transparent deposit on the bulb, but in thermionic valves where transparency is not necessary it is now customary to use metals almost exclusively as getters.

1959 New Scientist 26 Mar. 708//3 In other types of getter-ion pumps, the getter film is produced by sputtering—that is, by knocking atoms out of the bulk getter metal by bombarding it with the ions of the residual gas.

1979 D. J. Harra in G. L. Weissler & R. W. Carlson Vacuum Physics & Technol. (Methods Exper. Physics 14) v. 193 Getter pumping by titanium films was developed as a commercial vacuum technique during the early 1960s.

1984 J. R. Monkowski et al. in D. C. Gupta Semiconductor Processing (Amer. Soc. Testing & Materials, Spec. Techn. Publ. 850) 227 These defects are often located very near to device active regions and these defects are very effective getters of metallic impurities.

2008 K. Jousten et al. Handbk. Vacuum Technol. xi. 464 Bulk getters are made of solid, and in part, regenerative getter material, referred to as non-evaporable getter... Evaporation getters, in contrast, use getter material which is evaporated under vacuum and deposited as a thin and thus highly gas-receptive but not regenerative coating.