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A wildcatter is a person, or a small oil company, that drills for oil in a place where no oil has ever been found. Everyone else waits until the ground is proved; the wildcatter drills first, on a guess, hoping to be the one who finds it. Most of the time the hole is dry and the money is gone. Now and then the wildcatter strikes oil and becomes very rich very fast. So the word carries a whole personality with it. It is an American word, tied to the oil fields of Texas and Oklahoma, and it sounds a bit old and a bit romantic — the lone gambler against the big companies. When Americans use it, admiration and warning are usually mixed together: brave, independent, and not sensible. Because of that feeling, people also use it outside oil, for anyone who puts money into something risky and unproved: "a wildcatter of the tech world." That use is loose and always a little bit of a picture, not a job title. The related verb is "to wildcat", and a well drilled this way is "a wildcat well". Note for the entry line above: "wildcatter" is the person, not the action. "To drill where nobody has found oil yet" is the verb wildcat; the wildcatter is the one doing it.
（在無油紀錄的地區）冒險鑽探石油的人、投機探油者
組成wildcat + -er. The -er ending marks the person who does the thing, as in teacher and driver. The wildcat half is the odd part: a wildcat is a fierce cat living free in the hills, and Americans in the 1800s used "wildcat" for any business that was reckless, unsound, or set up out in wild country — there were wildcat banks before there were wildcat oil wells.
同家族的字
- wildcatthe word it is built from — the animal, and by extension anything risky and unofficial
- wildcat strikesame "unofficial, not approved" sense of wildcat: workers stopping work without their union's permission
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
wildcatternoun/ˈwaɪldˌkætə(ɹ)/
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Someone who drills for oil speculatively.
- One of America's most successful “wildcatters” is poised to explore for oil in Venezuela after agreeing a draft deal with the country's authorities and buying seismic data to gain a head start on rivals.
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A worker who participates in a wildcat strike.
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engineeringfirearmsgovernmentA person who makes wildcat cartridges and the guns that use them.
- Roy Weatherby began his career in the firearms industry as a “wildcatter”, developing his revolutionary ideas about rifle cartridge performance and design.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。