go·pher¹ / ˈgōfər/ • n. 1. (also pocket gopher) a burrowing rodent (family Geomyidae) with fur-lined pouches on the outside of the cheeks, found in North and Central America. ∎ inf. another term for ground squirrel. 2. (also gopher tortoise) a tortoise (Gopherus polyphemus, family Testudinidae) of dry sandy regions that excavates tunnels as shelter from the sun, native to the southern US. go·pher ² • n. variant spelling of gofer.

gopher A software utility that is used on a workstation connected to a network, and acts on behalf of the user in carrying out routine tasks of collecting information from services attached to the network. The term is used especially in connection with a set of utilities (Gopher) freely available to users of the Internet. Gopher presents the user with a hierarchy of nodes, each of which is either a menu (a directory of material accessible at this point), a search node (a set of documents that can be searched using keywords), or a leaf node (a document containing text or other forms of material that the workstation can display). Gopher does not provide embedded links to other documents as found in the World Wide Web, and is therefore rather less flexible. This in turn means that Gopher is simpler to implement. See also WAIS.

gopher a burrowing rodent of North and Central America. The word may come from Canadian French gaufre ‘honeycomb’, because the gopher ‘honeycombs’ the ground with its burrows.

Gopher is the name of a menu-based system which allows users of the Internet to search for and retrieve documents on topics of interest. The name comes from the gopher mascot of the University of Minnesota, US, where the system was invented.
Gopher State an informal name for Minnesota.

gopher Small, stout, burrowing rodent of North and Central America. It has fur-lined external cheek pouches and long incisor teeth outside the lips. It lives underground, digging tunnels to find roots and tubers and for shelter and food storage. Length: 13–46cm (5–18in). Family Geomyidae.

gopher2 (orig. U.S.) land tortoise XVIII (also †magofer); pouched rat; ground squirrel XIX. of uncert. orig.