operator
/ˈɒpəreɪtə
/noun
1 [often with modifier] A person who operates equipment or a machine: a radio operator...
- There are cooks, office staff, engineers, equipment operators, mechanics, welders, bosses, planners and many more jobs available at a mine.
- In such cases, the disease can be very dangerous for machine operators and drivers.
- So Griffin works as a machine operator at civil engineering company Westmode in Swindon.
Synonyms
machinist, mechanic, operative, engineer, driver, worker;
British machine minder
1.1A person who works at the switchboard of a telephone exchange: calls are made through the operator...
- Lonesome tells the story of a punch-press operator named Jim and a telephone switchboard operator named Mary who are desperately lonely, and then meet by chance during a holiday at Coney Island.
- There used to be a lot of more telephone switchboard operators around also, but technology made that job obsolete.
- The protective services department and the telephone switchboard operators also were notified.
2 [usually with modifier] A person or company that runs a business: a tour operator...
- He says there is a social aspect to the credit union movement, which consumers tired of greedy financial service industry operators find refreshing.
- The premier approved a controversial plan by transport secretary Stephen Byers to take Railtrack, the privatised national rail operator, into administration.
- The establishment of SBCGT has been therefore a response to the demand for credit and finance facilities by small business operators.
Synonyms
contractor, entrepreneur, promoter, impresario, arranger, fixer, trader, dealer, director, manager, partner, businessman, businesswoman, financier, venture capitalist, speculator
3 [with adjective] informal A person who acts in a shrewd or manipulative way: her reputation as a cool, clever operator...
- One of Rove's heroes was Mark Hanna, a shrewd political operator from Ohio who helped put William McKinley in the White House in 1896.
- Seemingly on his way out when he was shifted from the Foreign Office at the last reshuffle, this shrewd operator may have identified a swift route back to the heart of the government.
- A business graduate, he began to earn a name for himself as a shrewd and energetic operator at NCB stockbrokers.
Synonyms
manipulator, manoeuvrer, mover, worker, string-puller, mover and shaker, wheeler-dealer;
North American wirepuller
4 Mathematics A symbol or function denoting an operation (e.g. ×, +).His recent breakthroughs in the theory of characteristic functions for several commuting operators indicate that in spite of his seventy years, mathematically Moshe is still a young man....
- Smoothing operators and functions have been used for interpolation and, more generally, data fitting.
- Why does he require the associative law to hold if his symbols are operators?