Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

While in the library the other day, I noticed a book with the title “Tree Fallers of the Pacific Northwest.” Fallers…is that the right word?

Fell/fall is one of the transitive/intransitive verb pairs that typically gets left out of lists that include familiar pairs such as lay/lie, sit/set and raise/rise. It shares a complicating wrinkle with lay/lie in that the present tense of the transitive verb has the same form as the past tense of the intransitive verb, which sometimes leads to additional confusion.

To fell means "to cause to fall" or "to bring down by striking or cutting." Its past tense is "felled." So when you cut down a tree, felling is what you do and falling is what the tree does. Everyone seems to be in accord up until now. But when it comes to forming the agent-noun from the verb, the wires seem to get crossed. My old Merriam-Webster has no separate entry for “feller,” but lists “feller” as the agent-noun under the entry for the verb “fell” – one who fells. It does not list “faller” either by itself or under “fall.” So, prescriptivism seems to favor “feller” as the noun for a person who cuts down trees. Yet there seems to be clear descriptive preference for “tree faller” over “tree feller,” at least here in the Pacific Northwest.
Perhaps “feller” is instinctively avoided by some because it sounds like a dialectal pronunciation of “fellow” in some parts of the country. Which would you use?