Kolbindare

Kolbindare is a Swedish noun formed from kol, meaning coal, and bindare, meaning binder. The term is historical and not widely used in contemporary Swedish, often found in older industrial sources rather than modern language.

Historically, kolbindare referred to a worker in the coal sector whose task was to bind coal into bundles or sacks for transport, storage, or sale. The duties could include tying coal lumps or briquettes with rope or wire, preparing shipments, and sometimes assisting with weighing or labeling. The role would typically be part of a larger workflow in mines, dockyards, or coal depots.

In current usage, the word is largely obsolete outside historical documents. Modern terminology for similar tasks tends to be packer, binder, or a more general warehouse or cargo-handler designation. The scarcity of contemporary references means that kolbindare is mainly encountered in memoirs, company records, regional dialect writings, or linguistic discussions of historical industrial vocabulary.

Etymologically, it is a transparent compound that directly describes the activity: binding coal. The term may reflect regional or period-specific terminology, and its appearance can vary in old texts depending on spelling conventions of the era. For researchers or readers of industrial history, kolbindare offers a window into how work was described in coal-related labor before modern automation and standardized job titles became prevalent.