A person, then a tool
In present-day English a splicer is a person or a device that makes a splice. The job may sit on a ship, where rope and cable are joined by weaving strands together. It may sit on a telephone pole or in a manhole, where a technician joins electrical or fiber lines. It may sit on an editing bench, where a small jig holds two strips of film or magnetic tape while their ends are joined. The noun is an ordinary agent form. What it names has widened because the materials people splice have widened.
English on the surface
The origin of the word splicer is domestic. It is the verb splice plus the agent suffix -er, the same pattern that yields baker or printer. The verb had been in English for centuries before lexicographers catch the derived noun in print. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest evidence is from 1840, in Richard Henry Dana’s narrative of merchant-seaman life. That first recorded use belongs to a nautical setting, which matches the older career of the verb.
Some later dictionaries date splicer to 1925–30. That window belongs to a narrower sense: a device that holds motion-picture film or recording tape in alignment while the ends are fastened. The word as a name for a person who splices is older by roughly eighty years. The two datings are not a contradiction; they track two different things the noun can denote.
A sailors’ borrowing
English splice is not inherited from Old English. It entered in the early sixteenth century as a sailors’ verb. Sources place the first records around 1524–1525, with the sense of uniting two ropes by unlaying the strands at the ends and weaving them into one another. Merriam-Webster and the American Heritage Dictionary both trace the verb to an older Dutch form splissen, now splitsen. French took the same Dutch verb as épisser.
The noun splice, meaning the joint itself, appears about a century later, in the 1620s. One early witness is Captain John Smith. From the seventeenth century the verb also covers joins in timber and other materials, not only hemp and cable. The agent noun waited longer. Splicing as a gerund is already on record in the 1520s; splicer as a label for the worker is not securely attested until Dana.
From splitting to joining
The Dutch verb sits in a family of words for splitting. Middle Dutch had splitten, to split. German spleißen can mean both to split and to splice; Spliss names the breakage of hair into split ends. Swedish splitsa and Danish splidse belong to the same North Sea cluster.
That looks like a contradiction until the ropework is pictured. To splice two ends you first open them: you fray or split the strands so they can be tucked through one another. The Dutch verb is described as having named that fraying of the ends first, then the whole job of opening and reweaving. German followed the same path. A verb of splitting became a verb of joining because the join is made by splitting first. Oxford’s historical dictionary notes an obsolete English sense of splice meaning to split, which fits that older half of the process and then dropped away.
Beyond the West Germanic group the trail is less sure. One popular account links the cluster to Proto-Germanic *spli- and a reconstructed Indo-European root *(s)plei-, also proposed for flint, splinter, and split. The Oxford English Dictionary is more cautious: Middle Dutch splissen is of doubtful origin, perhaps related to split. Some specialists find the proposed non-Germanic cognates weak. The safe claim is a North Sea family around splitting; a deeper Indo-European story is possible, not proven.
English split itself is a later borrowing from the same Low German and Dutch neighborhood, in the late sixteenth century. Splice and split are cousins that arrived by sea, not native Old English twins that grew up side by side.
New materials, same job
Once the verb left the rigging, the agent noun could name new trades. Cable splicers joined telegraph, telephone, and power lines, work that still uses the word as a job title. Film editors of the 1910s and 1920s cut and joined celluloid. By 1912 the verb is recorded of motion-picture film; by 1923 the noun splice covers a join in a strip of film. The mechanical splicer, a jig that keeps two ends aligned, belongs to that era. In the 1970s biologists began to speak of splicing DNA, and the agent pattern was ready again for people and enzymes that cut and rejoin genetic material.
An older colloquial use of the verb, to marry, is on record from the nineteenth century and survives in get spliced. It did not produce a lasting job title. Nobody calls a registrar a splicer.
What the suffix hides
The printed noun looks, at first glance, like a twentieth-century studio word. Dana already had it in 1840, and the verb it is built on is a sixteenth-century Dutch loan. The odd history sits in that loan: a word for opening rope became a word for making it one piece. The English suffix only names who does the work. The work itself still begins with a split.