1621 G. Markham Hungers Preuention 39 Hard by this loope [of the net] shall there be fastened..a little broad thin trycker, made sharpe and equall at both ends.

1621 G. Markham Hungers Preuention 40 The loope and the tricker.

1736 Philos. Trans. 1735–6 (Royal Soc.) 39 84 That Tricker has a Pin.

1764 Museum Rusticum (1765) 3 lxv. 298 The triggers to throw the rake behind the roots.

1832 H. Douglas Ess. Mil. Bridges (ed. 2) vii. 375 The ram was worked by hand-ropes..attached to the fall, which is a much quicker way, than by the trigger and drop.

1885 C. G. W. Lock Workshop Receipts 4th Ser. 428/2 (Photography) A trigger is provided for releasing the shutter.

1913 E. T. Ruthven-Murray Let. 30 Dec. If the tram-car strikes anything on the track, the gate is pushed backwards and releases a ‘trigger’ (in this case a catch sustaining the tray) which allows the tray to fall so that it glides along on the road and scoops up the obstruction.

1706 G. Farquhar Recruiting Officer i. i. 1 This is the Cap of Honour, it dubs a Man a Gentleman in the drawing of a Tricker.

1808 M. L. Weems Let. 22 Apr. in Ford's M. L. Weems: Wks. & Ways (1929) II. 377 I trust that all your Aids will be quick on the trigger.

1842 C. M. Kirkland Forest Life II. xlvii. 304 ‘Pretty quick upon the trigger!’ muttered Uncle William.

1871 J. Tyndall Fragm. Sci. (1879) II. ii. 12 Prayer is the trigger which liberates the Divine power.

1887 G. H. Darwin in Leisure Hour May 354/2 The attraction of the moon or the variation in atmospheric pressure pulls the trigger.

1905 Daily Chron. 16 Feb. 4/5 A born musical leader, fertile in ideas, quick on the trigger.

1946 Lancet 19 Jan. 97/1 A theory of the nervous initiation of contraction—the trigger without which voluntary muscle remains inert.

1961 M. Laski Ecstasy ii. 16 Of the circumstances in which they found themselves when ecstasy took place, they identified certain objects, events, and ideas as standing in some kind of a causal relationship to their ecstatic experiences. These objects, events, and ideas I am calling triggers.

1977 J. L. Harper Population Biol. Plants 64 Triggers to development which predict a changing environment will generally be more efficient than those that are themselves the changed conditions.

1955 Times 13 Aug. 5/4 It was a question of arranging the proper conditions, and there was no reason why fusion energy should not be obtained without the use of a fission bomb as ‘the trigger’.

1969 Listener 5 June 773/3 It's necessary to have a trigger made of an ordinary fission bomb, and there is good evidence that this must consist of fissile uranium or uranium-235 and not fissile plutonium.

1982 New Scientist 2 Sept. 642/1 The X-rays produced by the triggers are absorbed and re-emitted by an ellipsoidal casing of ²³⁸U, and the fraction which is re-emitted inwards goes on to strike the main bulk of the thermonuclear fuel.

1891 Cent. Dict. Trigger area.

1900 W. A. N. Dorland Med. Dict. (1913) Trigger area, an area stimulation or irritation of which may cause physiologic or pathologic changes in another area.

1893 D. K. Clark Steam Engine III. 58 A square trigger-block..slides vertically through..the catch-block.

1938 Rev. Sci. Instruments 9 223/1 Another trigger circuit which has inherent possibilities as a counting circuit is shown in Fig. 2.

1951 Wireless Engineer XXVIII. 101/2 Two-position (bistable) trigger circuits.

1962 Gloss. Automatic Data Processing (B.S.I.) 58 Toggle, bistable trigger circuit, a trigger circuit which has two quasi-stable or stable states and which requires an appropriate excitation in each state to cause a transition to the other.

1974 A. Van der Ziel Introd. Electronics xi. 262 (caption) Transistor monostable circuit with trigger circuit.

1829 W. H. Maxwell Stories Waterloo I. 223 Removing Mr. Clinch's trigger-finger.

1890 J. S. Billings National Med. Dict. II Trigger finger, sudden arrest of the movement of extension (or, less frequently, of flexion) of one of the fingers, until a special effort is made, when the movement is completed with a snap or jerk.

1849 H. Melville Mardi I. xlviii. 131 The rank and file of the Trigger-fish—so called from their quaint dorsal fins being set in their backs with a conical curve, as if at half-cock.

1882 Ogilvie's Imperial Dict. (new ed.) Trigger-fish.

1884 Longman's Mag. Mar. 529 Trigger-fish and trunk-fish.

1908 Westm. Gaz. 3 Oct. 6/1 It penetrates into the body of the oyster in the expectation of its host being broken up and eaten by the trigger-fish.

1945 C. Burney Dungeon Democracy iii. 82 There was much trigger-happiness, men shooting each other, shooting themselves and shooting into thin air.

1970 Daily Tel. 23 Mar. 16 The trigger-happiness with which workers are now ready and eager to enforce their fantastically increased claims by industrial action..leaves Britain with the choice between being ruined by runaway inflation or by a series of disastrous strikes.

1978 N. Freeling Night Lords xxi. 95 Suddenly she said ‘Have you killed people?’.. I thought it the usual accusation of trigger-happiness.

1943 F. J. Bell Condition Red 190 Yes, they missed us, and the G hereby absolves whoever it was along that section of coast that got a little trigger-happy early one December morning.

1946 Archit. Rev. 101 47/1 On the Acropolis itself a group of trigger-happy gendarmerie lounged with an assumed nonchalance by the lower entrance.

1957 Time 2 Sept. 19/1 Some trigger-happy U.S. radio commentators..helped confuse it further by proclaiming that Syria was already Russia's newest satellite.

1971 H. Wilson Labour Govt. xxxvi. 937 It was fairly clear that the main issues now were relief and the avoidance of atrocities, which, if they occurred, would be most likely to be caused by trigger-happy young soldiers.

1974 F. Warner Meeting Ends i. ii. 7 If only you knew how trigger-happy he is when he gets a dialling tone.

1984 Miami Herald 6 Apr. 12 a/2 We have a president who is trigger-happy and who commits troops for impossible missions.

1930 Amer. Mercury Dec. 458/2 Trigger man, an assassin; a body guard. ‘He's trigger man for Big Tony.’

1934 Sun (Baltimore) 22 Aug. 13/1 I was the triggerman in both hold-ups.

1954 ‘N. Blake’ Whisper in Gloom iii. 42 A graceful, self-possessed, cat-like walk..the tread of the trigger-man.

1974 Times 2 May 6/5 P[resident]... You feel that really the trigger man was really Colson on this thing? D[ean] No... He was just in the chain.

1977 Hongkong Standard 12 Apr. 9/3 He was said to be a senior triggerman—an overseer of ‘hit men’—for reputed mob boss Anthony ‘Big Tuna’ Accardo.

1981 W. Safire in N.Y. Times Mag. 1 Mar. 9/3 The triggerman of this slim but explosive volume is described on the cover as ‘formerly professor of Romance languages and literatures at Harvard University, where he is now emeritus professor’.

1884 W. Miller Dict. Eng. Names Plants Trigger-plant, Stylidium graminifolium and other species.

1891 Cent. Dict. Trigger point.

1900 in W. A. N. Dorland Med. Dict. (1913)

1952 N.Y. Times 12 Aug. (Late City ed.) 32/6 The federation estimates that at the beginning of suspension the average of current prices was 69.39 per cent of their 1951 highs, which meant that they could rise a little more than 15 per cent before reaching the so-called ‘trigger-point’.

1979 H. Kissinger White House Years ix. 330 I had to learn an entire vocabulary of international trade, such as ‘export subsidy techniques’ as well as the arcane complexity of ‘trigger points’ (at which restraints would go into effect).

1978 Business Week 23 Jan. 25/2 (heading) Steel trigger-prices start sowing discord.

1978 Business Week 23 Jan. 26/3 Jack Meyer, assistant director of the Council on Wage & Price Stability, which devised the trigger-price system.

1981 Economist 24 Jan. 88/1 The renewal of trigger prices last October coincided with a recovery in demand for, eg, tubes for the oil and gas industry, plates and girders for process plant and construction.

1946 Radar: Summary Rep. & Harp Project (U.S. National Defense Res. Comm., Div. 14) 144/2 Trigger pulse, a pulse which starts a cycle of operations.

1956 IRE Trans. Electronic Computers 5 124/1 For trigger pulses of a few mμsec duration there will be little or no interference between the trigger pulse and the change of voltage at the cathodes of the EFP-60's.

1981 J. D. Lenk Handbk. Digital Electronics ii. 84 The circuit changes state only when both the input pulse and a clock pulse are present simultaneously. (The clock pulse is also known as a gate pulse or trigger pulse.)

1894 Electrician 15 June 188/1 Zehnder's trigger tube.

1939 H. J. Reich Theory & Applic. Electron Tubes vii. 208 A single pentode may also be used as a trigger tube.

1978 R. V. Jones Most Secret War viii. 69 My first step was to take the electronic trigger tube down to my former colleagues at the Admiralty Research Laboratory, to get them to evaluate its performance.

18.. R. Browning Miniature iv, in The Sibyl (Rugby Sch.) 1 Apr. 1893 Arquebuses and pistols triggerless.

1986 Making Music Apr. 6/3 It can store MIDI data, trigger routeing, and all the parameters of its own built-in delay and sequencer. Also out now is the TMI, a cheap trigger-to-MIDI interface.

1998 Canad. Musician (Electronic ed.) 1 Dec. You can learn to program drum machines, learn to use sequencers and maybe even add in some triggers or electronic pads to your drum set up.

1867 W. H. Smyth & E. Belcher Sailor's Word-bk.

1877 E. H. Knight Pract. Dict. Mech. Trigger... A piece of wood placed under a dog-shore to hold it up until the time for launching.

1896 Strand Mag. 12 324/2 This obstacle, known variously as the ‘trigger’, ‘dagger’, or ‘dog-shore’, is usually a short length of hard-wood interposed—in a sloping direction, and in such a way as to promptly yield to a smart downward blow—between fixed projections on the side of the standing ways and of the sliding ways.

1899 Daily News 16 Jan. 7/3 The last blocks had been knocked away and the Oceanic was held in place only by a ‘trigger’ on each side. These huge triggers of cast steel..work in hydraulic pistons, and fit into slots of the sliding ways.

1900 Engin. Mag. 19 681 From these triggers, dog shores, bearing only about one-quarter of an inch outside of the fulcrum, extend up against the keel.

1843 Hardy in Hist. Berwickshire Naturalists' Club 2 No. 11. 56 Two men, named triggers, must see that when the race for the succeeding cast of the bowl has concluded, the straw is exactly between the feet of the party whose turn it is to dismiss the bowl.

1891 H. Johnston Kilmallie II. xix. 110 (Curling) The second, third, and fourth players, on each side, footed the trigger, and sent their stones hurtling along the as yet unpolished ice towards the goal.

1930 R. Campbell Adamastor 94 When life is triggered by a hair And stands upon the peak of death.

1938 Sun (Baltimore) 18 Apr. 8/5 Denmark, whose people thrive on thrift, milk, bacon and eggs, and never need ‘triggering’ into activity by shot-in-the-arm spendings of borrowed billions.

1948 Sat. Evening Post 20 Mar. 39/3 There is certainly no lack of evidence that the typical glaucoma patient has a nervous temperament and that emotional episodes will increase the pressure within the eyeball and even trigger off acute attacks.

1949 Sun (Baltimore) 26 Sept. 4/1 The strike..was triggered by two rival AFL unions.

1950 Sun (Baltimore) 21 July 14/3 A system by which the powers are prepared but lie dormant until triggered into action by specific congressional action is the ideal.

1958 W. J. H. Sprott Human Groups 163 May it not be that a crowd is ‘triggered off’ by people whose ‘thresholds of mob-involvement’..are low?

1958 Spectator 19 Sept. 379/1 But as a space-veteran who once triggered a ray~gun with Flash Gordon, let me advise you to read on.

1958 Listener 23 Oct. 648/2 Artists like Joan Mitchell, Al Leslie..have all been triggered by de Kooning's example.

1959 Listener 18 June 1083/2 Sir Faithful Fortescue..whose loyalties were so finely triggered that he rode across from Parliament side to Royalist.

1968 J. D. McCawley in E. Bach & R. T. Harms Universals in Ling. Theory 168 Chomsky..in effect asserts that all lexical insertion takes place in the base component unless triggered by other transformations.

1972 Amateur Photographer 12 Jan. 42/2 (caption) Recently there have been a number of flash meters on the market which, when placed at the subject position read out the correct f/stop to use when the flash is triggered.

1973 C. Bonington Next Horizon xiii. 190 We tiptoed up the snow, hardly daring to talk, as if the resonance of our voices might trigger off an avalanche.

1977 New Yorker 5 Sept. 80/3 Before I improvise, I just listen, and that triggers me.

1978 S. Sheldon Bloodline xlii. 361 His eyes were fixed on the ribbon that the girl was wearing around her neck. It triggered a memory.

1978 N.Y. Mag. 3 Apr. 10/1 The Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the mass murder that triggered it have nearly obliterated from the public consciousness the killing of Egyptian editor Yousef el-Sebai.

1981 Times 5 May 15/7 The fact that no danger signals were triggered during the growth of Norton Warburg has alarmed the City.

1945 Electronic Industries Sept. 226 Triggered spark gap, a fixed spark gap in which the discharge passes between two electrodes and is struck (started) by a subsidiary electrode, the trigger, to which low power pulses are applied at regular intervals from a pulse amplifier, thus closing the switch.

1967 Listener 30 Nov. 694/1 The triggered responses which might deter me..no longer apply.

1977 J. L. Harper Population Biol. Plants xviii. 520 Most of these annuals have a precisely triggered transition from the vegetative to reproductive phase depending on photo~period.

1944 Electronic Engin. 16 380 The harmonics generated in the circuit provide standard frequencies..for..high speed triggering etc.

1958 K. Amis I like it Here xii. 152 The sight of it at this moment must have had some triggering effect on Bowen's alimentary canal.

1962 Listener 3 May 770/2 This would involve installing a ‘triggering’ device in the vehicle.

1972 Language 48 299 Identity-of-reference deletions involve two coreferential NP's, a vanishing NP and a triggering NP. I propose that the rule of deletion..superimpose the vanishing NP over the triggering NP, keeping both NP nodes.

1977 Savage & Rumbaugh in D. M. Rumbaugh Language Learning by Chimpanzee xvi. 289 ‘Triggering’ in this sense implies that the energy expended during the output of a communicative pattern is unrelated to the energy of the response.