Compositor

//kəmˈpɒzɪtə(ɹ)// noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 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."

  2. 2
    one who sets written material into type wordnet
  3. 3
    One who, or that which, composes or sets in order.

    "I work as an image compositor."

  4. 4
    A system that puts images together in a buffer (such as individual windows on a desktop) to generate a final display image.

Example

More examples

"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."

Etymology

From French compositeur, from Latin compositor.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.