Word.ws English Dictionary

gate-keeper

gate-keeper is the alternative spelling of gatekeeper.

Meaning of gatekeeper

Noun

gatekeeper (plural gatekeepers)

  1. A person who guards or monitors passage through a gate.
    • […]“Here,” he said, stepping forward and handing twopence to the gatekeeper; “let the young woman pass.”1874, Thomas Hardy, chapter 1, in Far from the Madding Crowd. […], volume I, London: Smith, Elder & Co., […], →OCLC, page 9
  2. (figuratively) A person or group who controls access to something or somebody.
    • The sources the citations are drawn from are significant, being printed books or newspapers subject to editorial processes and gatekeepers of language standards, as opposed to unedited texts such as blogs, chatroom logs or student writing.2012, James Lambert, “Beyond Hobson-Jobson: A new lexicography for Indian English”, in World Englishes, page 302
  3. A common orange and brown butterfly with eyespots, Pyronia tithonus, of the family Nymphalidae.
  4. In dissociative identity disorder, an aspect of the personality that controls access to the various identities.
  5. One who gatekeeps.
  6. A provider of core platform services with specific characteristics (Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 of the European Parliament and of the Council)

Forms of gate-keeper

pluralgate-keepers

Questions about gate-keeper

What is gate-keeper the alternative spelling of?
Gate-keeper is the alternative spelling of gatekeeper.

Words near gate-keeper in the dictionary

  1. gate-crashers
  2. gate-crashes
  3. gate-crashing
  4. gate-happy
  5. gate-keep
  6. gate-keeper
  7. gate-keepers
  8. gate-keeping
  9. gate-keeps
  10. gate-keepy
  11. gate-kept

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gate-keeper (page history and authors); gatekeeper (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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Cite this entry: “gate-keeper.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/gate-keeper. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.