collector
Pluralcollectors
- 1A person, or sometimes a device, that gathers items together or builds and manages a collection.
The art collector loaned several paintings to the museum.
Rainwater collectors on the roof channel runoff into a storage tank.
Similargatherer
Note
The general sense, and the root of all the others: Middle English collectour, through Anglo-Norman from Latin colligō, "to gather together". A collector is usually named by what is gathered, as in a stamp collector or an art collector. The pattern stretches to things, often with a wry edge. An unplayed piano becomes a dust collector, gathering only what nobody wanted.
- 2A person employed to gather the payments that are owed.
The collector visited each tenant to gather the overdue rent.
Tax collectors traveled from village to village recording what each household paid.
Note
The job is old, and so is its reputation for persistence. James Dalrymple's Decisions of 1668 records excise tacksmen hiring a collector at a salary of thirty pounds sterling a year. Lady Gaga and Beyoncé's "Telephone" (2010) compares a ringing phone to a collector who keeps calling. The word usually takes the thing owed in front of it, as in tax collector.
- 3The terminal on a bipolar junction transistor that gathers the main charge carriers and carries the amplified output current.
A small base current controls the much larger current flowing into the collector.
The collector and emitter are doped differently to set the transistor's behavior.
Oppositeemitter
Note
Here the name is literal. This terminal gathers the charge carriers that the emitter injects across the base. With its junction to the base reverse-biased, it draws them off as the amplified output current. That is why engineers speak of collector current, and why collector, base and emitter are named together as the transistor's three terminals.
- 4A major sewer that gathers sewage from a number of smaller branch sewers into one main channel.
Each neighborhood's drains feed into a single collector running beneath the avenue.
The collector carries sewage from dozens of branch lines to the treatment plant.
Similarmain
- 5A mafia member tasked with collecting protection money from small businesses.
The collector worked his way down the street, squeezing each storekeeper for his weekly cut.
Local shop owners feared the collector who enforced the gang's demands.
Note
The underworld's version of the payment collector, keeping the same job title for a very different round. The plain word does a lot of work here: calling it "collecting" makes extortion sound like a routine call on customers, and the fear in the shopkeeper's face is what the title leaves unsaid.
- 6A compiler of books: a person who gathers scattered passages and arranges them together in one volume.
The collector assembled fragments of medieval verse into a single annotated edition.
Working for years, the collector drew scattered sermons together into one printed book.
Similarcompiler, editor, anthologist
Note
The bookish ancestor of the anthologist: someone who assembles other people's words rather than writing new ones. Joseph Addison, in his Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705), describes volumes made "without any of the collector's own reflections". The phrase captures the ideal of the role, in which the compiler gathers and arranges and otherwise stays out of the way.
- 7A holder of a Bachelor of Arts at Oxford, formerly appointed to supervise certain scholastic exercises during Lent.
Appointed collector for the term, he presided over the disputations held throughout Lent.
Whereupon he soon after appointed A. W. his collector in Austins; which office he kept till he was admitted Mr. of arts
1655, Anthony Wood, diariesNote
A post in Oxford's old academic routine, and a temporary one. Anthony Wood's diaries for 1655 record a man appointed "his collector in Austins", an office he held only until he was admitted Master of Arts. Reserve the word for historical writing about the university. Anywhere else, readers will take it in one of its everyday senses.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English collectour, from Anglo-Norman collectour, from Late Latin collector, ultimately from Latin colligō ("to gather together").