Also 7 souldiour, 8–9 Sc. and dial. sodger, 9 soger, sojer. [f. the sb.]
1. intr. To act or serve as a soldier. Also with it.
α. 1647. Gentilis, trans. Malvezzi’s Chiefe Events, 187. If I souldiour it with so great a souldiour.
1815. Ann. Reg., Chron., App. 307. I will soldier it with anybody, but I will not go to school.
1825. in Col. Hawker, Diary (1893), I. 287. Too busy soldiering to think of pheasant shooting.
1867. Morning Star, 30 Jan. I have soldiered for six months at a stretch on a penny a day.
1889. Sat. Rev., 16 March, 319/1. They soldier as if their very lives depended on it.
β. 1818. Scott, Rob Roy, xviii. Thae papist cattle that hae been sodgering abroad.
1852. J. Fraser, King Jas. V., III. ii. He … said he would sodger nae mair.
b. In phrase to go (a-) soldiering.
1756. H. Walpole, Lett. (1846), III. 229. If you think of conveying them through Moreland, he is gone a soldiering.
1816. Scott, Old Mort., vi. This comes o’ letting ye gang a-sodgering for a day.
1845. G. P. R. James, Arrah Neil, vii. It does not do to go soldiering in these times without money in one’s pocket.
1896. R. L. Stevenson, in Pall Mall Mag., Dec., 458. It was my mother’s name, and good to go soldiering with.
c. dial. To bully; to hector. (Halliwell, 1847.)
d. To feign illness, to malinger; to make a mere show of working, to shirk.
1840. R. H. Dana, Bef. Mast, iv. There is no time to be lost,—no ‘sogering,’ or hanging back then.
1876. C. D. Warner, Winter on Nile, 248. They stretch out … so far that it needs an opera-glass to discover whether the leaders are pulling or only soldiering.
1890. Clark Russell, My Shipmate Louise, I. vi. 119. Finding fault with some fellow for ‘sogering,’ as it is called.
e. Mil. slang. To furbish up accoutrements, etc.
1885. Mrs. J. H. Ewing, Story Short Life, 35. I was busy soldiering till too late; so I come in this morning.
2. trans. a. ? To drill or train.
1780. S. J. Pratt, Emma Corbett (ed. 4), I. 107. Confess, that I am sufficiently soldier’d; for I can hold the pen, and impress the quiet-seeming sentiment.
b. To serve out one’s time as a soldier.
1873. Daily News, 21 May, 5/6. A man may soldier out his term in the British cavalry [etc.].
c. Austr. slang. To make temporary use of (another man’s horse).
1891. in Cent. Dict.
Hence Soldiering ppl. a.
1607. Middleton, The Phœnix, I. ii. Enter the Captain with soldiering fellows.
1795. Burns, ‘Fy, let us a’,’ x. The wild Scot o’ Galloway, Sodgerin gunpowder Blair.
