thumb|right|250px|A "navvy" depicted in Ford Madox Brown's painting Work Navvy, a clipping of navigator (UK) or navigational engineer (US), mainly refers to the manual labourers working on major civil engineering projects, though it is also used in North America to refer to mechanical shovels and earth moving machinery. The term was coined in the late 18th century in Great Britain when numerous canals were being built, which were also sometimes known as "navigations".
thumb|right|250px|A "navvy" depicted in Ford Madox Brown's painting Work Navvy, a clipping of navigator (UK) or navigational engineer (US), mainly refers to the manual labourers working on major civil engineering projects, though it is also used in North America to refer to mechanical shovels and earth moving machinery. The term was coined in the late 18th century in Great Britain when numerous canals were being built, which were also sometimes known as "navigations".
== Nationalities == A study of 19th-century British railway contracts by David Brooke, coinciding with census returns, showed that the great majority of navvies in Britain were English. He also stated that "only the ubiquitous Irish can be regarded as a truly international force in railway construction," but the Irish were only about 30% of the navvies.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).