Discriminator
noun
noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 A person who discriminates, as:; A person who differentiates things or concepts.
"keen discriminator"
- 2 a person who (or that which) differentiates wordnet
- 3 A person who discriminates, as:; A person who acts unfairly through prejudice.
"I am not a discriminator"
- 4 A test or variable, etc. that serves to distinguish between different things.
"Colour is not an effective discriminator when it comes to the spiciness of food."
- 5 Any of several electronic devices that convert some property of a signal into an amplitude whose value is proportional to the difference between the value of the input signal and that of a standard.
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- 6 A feature of the seller's offering that differs from a competitor's offering and is important to the buyer in question.
"An especially strong warranty can be a discriminator in some marketplaces."
Example
More examples"Generally, we may say, that Mr. Smith is a very accomplished etymological scholar, a very keen discriminator, and that his illustrative examples are selected with great industry, and from a wide field of English literature […]"
Etymology
From discriminate + -or.
Related phrases
More for "discriminator"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.