operator

noun15

1. •
   a person or company that controls a machine, or runs a system or service

   • The drone crashed because of operator error.
   • The new bus operator has promised to improve the frequency of rural services.
2. •
   A telecommunications facilitator whose job is to connect or otherwise assist callers.

   • To get an international line, you used to have to go through the operator.
   • I kept getting "number unobtainable", so I called the operator to find out what was going on.
3. •
   The administrator of a channel or network on IRC.
4. •
   A bus driver.
5. •
   (informal) A person who is adept at making deals or getting results, especially one who uses questionable methods.

   • Francis Urquhart: I think Lord Billsborough is starting to lose touch a bit. Tim Stamper: Shame. Used to be a hell of an operator in his day. — 1990
6. •
   (slang) A thief or charlatan.

   • Hank was saying, "Lyssa showed me the screenshots of Nate's accounts, so we know he's helping himself to Nate's money every month. The guy's a real operator." — 2016
7. •
   (slang) A major criminal.

   • The second thing is that smart operators like Cocky are only in it for the (huge amounts of) money. — 2000
8. •
   (slang, old-fashioned) Someone who is successful at pursuing women; a player.

   • Anyway, there's gonna be plenty of girls. Plenty of girls for an operator like you. — 1996
9. •
   A function or other mapping that carries values defined on a domain into another value or set of values in a defined range.
10. •
    A symbol that represents a construct in a programming language and differs from a normal function in its syntax.
11. •
    A member of a military special operations unit.
12. •
    The company that operates a mine; often the same one that owns the mine.
13. •
    A surgeon; one who performs medical operations.

    • Oh, a very well-known man. He has a great reputation as an operator for peritonitis. — 1923
14. •
    A kind of expression that enters into an a-bar movement dependency and is said to bind a variable.

    • In the sentence "What did Bill say he wants to buy?", "what" is an operator, binding a phonetically empty variable.
15. •
    The game of Chinese whispers.