the.com/fielder

means A player stationed on the field whose role is to catch, stop, or retrieve the ball on defense rather than bat or bowl.

from Straightforward agent-noun formation: 'field' — from Old English 'feld,' meaning open land, the cleared ground where games came to be played — plus the workaday suffix '-er,' which turns almost any verb or place into 'the one who does it there.' So a fielder is simply, literally, 'one who works the field,' a plain compound born once cricket and its cousins needed a word for the player standing out in the grass rather than at the crease or the stumps.