Handler
name, noun ·Uncommon ·College level
Definitions
- 1 One who handles something (especially manually) or someone. literally
"The handler of a weapon gets a symbolic sensation of deadly power."
- 2 (sports) someone in charge of training an athlete or a team wordnet
- 3 A controller, trainer, someone who handles a specified thing, animal or person (especially a prizefighter).
"The spy's handler told him to approach the subject by posing as a dog handler."
- 4 an agent who handles something or someone wordnet
- 5 An advisor or manager providing guidance to a person occupying public office or a prominent position.
"The governor received guidance on how to best disseminate key information to the public from her handler."
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- 6 one who trains or exhibits animals wordnet
- 7 A subroutine that handles a particular situation such as an event or exception.
"If the expression is a throw, we unwind the stack seeking a handler expression."
- 1 A surname.
Example
More examples"Samples are acquired from an analog-to-digital converter at interrupt level and written to one of two ping-pong buffers. When one buffer fills, the interrupt handler switches to the other and sets a flag for the full buffer to be written to disk."
Etymology
From Middle English handler, handiller, equivalent to handle + -er.
Related phrases
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.