Definition of "breaker"

Now and then in the lagoon you hear the leaping of a fish […]. And above all, ceaseless like time, is the dull roar of the breakers on the reef.

1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter 53, in The Moon and Sixpence, [New York, N.Y.]: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers […], pages 279–280

And then went down to the ship,Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea

1925, Ezra Pound, Canto I

There came a cry "Oh, there be breakers dead ahead!" / From the collier Nightingale

1979, Stan Rogers (lyrics and music), “The Flowers of Bermuda” (track 6), in Between the Breaks ... Live!, Dundas, Ontario: Fogarty's Cove Music

Their radios had been blocked by a breaker calling himself Yankee Bucket Mouth.

2015, Dave Wise, Stuart Wise, Like A Summer With A Thousand Julys

A hasty and passionate breaker will often make a really goodtempered young horse an inveterate gibber

1831-1850, William Youatt, On the Structure and the Diseases of the Horse

"My beauty endures even as I endure; still, if thou wilt, oh rash man, have thy will; but blame not me if passion mount thy reason, as the Egyptian breakers used to mount a colt, and guide it whither thou wilt not."

1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887

Breaker to the Bandit

1977, Smokey and the Bandit, spoken by Sheriff Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason)

Then the conversation broke off, and there was little more talking, only a noise of men going backwards and forwards, and of putting down of kegs and the hollow gurgle of good liquor being poured from breakers into the casks.

1898, J. Meade Falkner, chapter 4, in Moonfleet, London, Toronto, Ont.: Jonathan Cape, published 1934