keener
Having been born and raised in the United States, I was unaware of the slang noun keener until I came to the University of Toronto. Keener is used to denote enthusiastic and over-eager students and is mildly derogatory. One hears instructors uttering phrases like “I assigned extra reading, knowing that only the keeners would actually do it.” And instructors are ambivalent about the keeners. On the one hand, their enthusiasm is appreciated, but on the other that same enthusiasm can become tiresome. The joy of having a bright, motivated student who strives to get an A wears off after the seventh frantic email on the night before an essay is due.
This Canadian slang term dates to at least 1973, when it appears in a 21 July article in the Winnipeg Free Press about a playground where children are given tools and encouraged to build their own treehouses and play forts:
The hammers and saws and other tools are kept locked up in a portable shack at the park until the two playground supervisors arrive in the morning, but they usually find a number of keeners already working on various projects using tools brought from home.
There is an older, better attested slang sense of keener meaning a sharp, alert individual, one who drives a hard bargain. This is an Americanism that dates to at least 1839. Citations of this sense in slang dictionaries tend to stop around the turn of the twentieth century, but given that keener is formed from the adjective keen and the common suffix -er, there is no reason to think that people stopped using it, and the term was undoubtedly independently recoined on many occasions. The current Canadian usage may be a continuation and specialization of this older sense, or it may be an independent coinage.
The slang term is unrelated to the word, from Irish, meaning one who sings a lament for the dead. English use of that keener dates to the eighteenth century and is from the verb to keen, caoin- in Irish, meaning to wail or lament.
Sources:
Canadian Oxford Dictionary, second edition, 2004, s.v. keener, n. Oxford Reference Premium Collection.
Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Prinicples (DCHP-2), October 2016, s.v. keener, n.
FitzRandolph, Katie. “Girl’s Wish Comes True in W. K. Adventure Spot,” Winnipeg Free Press (Manitoba), 21 July 1973, 3/4. NewspaperArchive.com.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 19 November 2025, s.v. keener, n.
Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1901, s.v. keener, n.1, keen, adj. and adv.; 1933, s.v. keener, n.2.
Photo credit: Steve Hillebrand/US Fish & Wildlife Service, before 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.
