identifier

Noun

1. Someone who identifies; a person who establishes the identity of someone or something.
   • The Identifier personally inspects each horse in each race by verifying the lip tattoo, body color, head and leg markings, scars, and chestnut (night eyes). - 2001, Theodore A. Landers, The Career Guide to the Horse...
   • The foal papers are documents recording the horse's registration; no horse can start in any race unless his papers are in the hands of the track's identifier. - 2004, John McEvoy, Great Horse Racing Mysteries: True...
   • Here, we would use the anonymous key technique to obtain a quantum identification protocol AKI of the challenge-response type in which the identifier cannot pretend to be the identifiee […] - 2007, Paolo Tombesi, Osamu...
2. Something that identifies or uniquely points to something or someone else.
   • Prehistoric artists used hand-prints in cave paintings, perhaps as a 'signature'. They might be considered the earliest example of a biometric identifier. - 2008, Ted Dunstone, Neil Yager, Biometric System and Data...
   • The source stated that the alleged victims wanted the paperwork released after the settlement, but with names and identifiers removed. - 2016 September 1, Ellie Kaufman, “University of Kentucky sues student newspaper...
3. One who identifies as a particular type or role; one who says and believes that they are a certain thing.
   • While the DOJ and BOJS already calculate data by gender, trans identifiers are not included, it is solely by men and women - 2019, Raina Simone Henderson, The Cost of Identity, page 80:
4. A guidebook that helps determine the specific class of an object (such as a mushroom, herb, fish, bird, drug, or mineral), or its individual identity (such as that of a star).
5. A formal name used in source code to refer to a variable, function, procedure, package, etc. or in an operating system to refer to a process, user, group, etc.
6. A code that distinguishes a particular element from all other elements in a document.
7. A primary key.