operator

Noun

1. A person or organisation that operates a device, system, service, etc.
   • The drone crashed because of operator error.
   • The new bus operator has promised to improve the frequency of rural services.
   • The stories did not seem to me to touch life. […] They left me with the impression of a well-delivered stereopticon lecture, with characters about as life-like as the shadows on the screen, and whisking on and off, at...
2. A telecommunications facilitator whose job is to connect or otherwise assist callers.
   • To get an international line, you used to have to go through the operator.
   • I kept getting "number unobtainable", so I called the operator to find out what was going on.
3. A member of a military special operations unit.
4. A surgeon; one who performs medical operations.
   • Oh, a very well-known man. He has a great reputation as an operator for peritonitis. - 1923, Ernest Bramah, The Eyes of Max Carrados:
5. The game of Chinese whispers.
6. A person who is adept at making deals or getting results, especially one who uses questionable methods.
   • Francis Urquhart: I think Lord Billsborough is starting to lose touch a bit. Tim Stamper: Shame. Used to be a hell of an operator in his day. - 1990, House of Cards, season 1, episode 1:
7. A function or other mapping that carries values defined on a domain into another value or set of values in a defined range.
8. The administrator of a channel or network on IRC.
9. A symbol that represents a construct in a programming language and differs from a normal function in its syntax.
10. A kind of expression that enters into an a-bar movement dependency and is said to bind a variable.
    • In the sentence "What did Bill say he wants to buy?", "what" is an operator, binding a phonetically empty variable.
11. A bus driver.
12. The company that operates a mine; often the same one that owns the mine.

    Coordinate Terms: mineowner[coinstantial mineworker miner worker laborer labor union trade union regulator