Word.ws English Dictionary

compositor

/kəmˈpɒzɪtə(ɹ)/

compositor noun: a person who sets type; a typesetter.

Noun

compositor (plural compositors)

  1. A person who sets type; a typesetter.
    • Thus, when he drew up instructions in lawyer language […] his clerks […] understood him very well. If he had written a love letter, or a farce, or a ballade, or a story, no one, either clerks, or friends, or compositors, would have understood anything but a word here and a word there.1892, Walter Besant, “Prologue: Who is Edmund Gray?”, in The Ivory Gate […], New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […], →OCLC
    • All Spaniards, we discovered, knew two English expressions. One was 'O.K., baby', the other was a word used by the Barcelona whores in their dealings with English sailors, and I am afraid the compositors would not print it.1938 April, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter IV, in Homage to Catalonia, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC
  2. One who, or that which, composes or sets in order.
    • I work as an image compositor.
  3. A system that puts images together in a buffer (such as individual windows on a desktop) to generate a final display image.

compositor meaning in Tamil, Bengali and Malayalam

compositor in Tamil

அச்சுக் கோப்பாளர்

compositor in Bengali

a compositor
অক্ষরজীবী ôkkhôrjibi, অক্ষরজীবক ôkkhôrjibôk, অক্ষরজীবিক ôkkhôrjibik

compositor in Malayalam

അച്ചുനിരത്തുകാരൻ, അച്ചടി ചെയ്യുന്നയാൾ

Examples of compositor in a sentence

  • You can see why compositors reflexively filled lines to be corrected with etaoin shrdlus.
  • When, for example, Walter Scott's copy was received, compositors began to upmake lines of type in the caseroom or composing room.
  • Caslon or Garamond or Baskerville is shouted as the compositors search for as many cases of these types as can be found.

All 12 example sentences with compositor

Forms of compositor

pluralcompositors

Origin of compositor

From French compositeur, from Latin compositor.

Words formed from compositor

Questions about compositor

What does compositor mean?
Compositor means a person who sets type; a typesetter.
What is compositor in Tamil?
Compositor in Tamil is அச்சுக் கோப்பாளர். See Compositor meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is compositor?
Compositor is a noun.
How do you pronounce compositor?
Compositor is pronounced /kəmˈpɒzɪtə(ɹ)/.
What is the plural of compositor?
The plural of compositor is compositors.

Words near compositor in the dictionary

  1. compositionist
  2. compositionists
  3. compositions
  4. compositive
  5. compositively
  6. compositor
  7. compositoress
  8. compositoresses
  9. compositorial
  10. compositorially
  11. compositors

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: compositor (page history and authors); compositor (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); অক্ষরজীবক (Bengali) (page history and authors); compositor (Malayalam Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-compositor.wav.

Cite this entry: “compositor.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/compositor. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.