calculator
nounUS /kæl.kjə.leɪ.tɚ/ · /ˈkæl.kjə.leɪ.tə(ɹ)/
Etymology In the sense of a person, from Middle English calkelatour (“a mathematician, an astrologer”), borrowed from Latin calculātor, equivalent to calculate + -or. The other meanings arose in Modern English.
1
A mechanical or electronic device that performs mathematical calculations; (now usually) an electronic one specifically.
- electronic calculator; pocket calculator
- The calculator on a bookkeeper's desk in the 1950s was an adding machine with mechanical guts.
1 more example
- I told him to hand me a calculator and he jokingly placed an adding machine at my side.
2
Historical A person who performs mathematical calculation.
- During the war, his grandmother had worked at the Bletchley Park decoding station as a calculator.
- First, many real-world investors bear little resemblance to the cool calculators of efficient-market theory: they're all too subject to herd behavior, to bouts of irrational exuberance and unwarranted panic.2020, Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future, page 145:
3
A person who calculates (in the sense of scheming).
- Near-synonyms: schemer, plotter; manipulator
- He revealed himself to be a cold-blooded calculator out to sabotage his colleagues.
2 more examples
- Talk not thus, I implore you, Evelyn: do not imagine me the worldly calculator that my enemies deem me.1838, [Edward Bulwer-Lytton], chapter X, in Alice or The Mysteries […], volume I, London: Saunders and Otley, […], →OCLC, book I, page 92:
- You have in the merchant the shrewd calculator of probable contingencies; we shall see that we have in the prophet the absolute proclaimer of necessary and inevitable facts.1858, John Cumming, Thy Word is Truth: an apology for Christianity, page 112:
4
Obsolete A set of mathematical tables.