controller
Pluralcontrollers
- 1A hardware device, typically held in the hands, that is designed for playing video games.
The console comes with one wireless controller, so you'll need to buy another for two-player games.
After years of heavy use, the buttons on his old controller had started to stick.
Note
Players usually just say controller; game controller is the fuller name, used when the talk is not already about games. It is above all the thing in the player's hands, and HAL Laboratory's EarthBound (1995) plays on exactly that, stepping out of the story to address "you—the one holding the controller."
- 2A person who controls something or has control over it.
Critics saw the general as the real controller of the government, whatever the president's title.
Regulators feared that a single owner would become the controller of most of the country's newspapers.
Note
At its grandest the word could name a ruler of destiny: Dryden's 1700 translation of The Wife of Bath, Her Tale speaks of "the great controller of our fate," who "deigned to be man." Everyday use is plainer, and the word is usually followed by of to name what is controlled: of a fortune, of a government, of the press.
- 3The chief accounting officer of a company or government, who audits and manages its financial affairs; also called a comptroller.
As corporate controller, she signs off on every quarterly financial statement.
The city controller released an audit showing that the transit agency had overspent by millions.
Similarcomptroller
Note
The accountant's title has a twin, comptroller, and the two are one word in different spellings. Both go back through Anglo-Norman and French to Medieval Latin contrārotulātor, from the same Latin source as the verb control, so the title only looks like control plus -er. It is usually qualified by where the officer serves: a corporate controller, a city controller.
- 4An electric or mechanical device used to control a circuit or a system.
The motorman eased the controller back to slow the streetcar on the hill.
A faulty motor controller stopped the conveyor belt without warning.
Note
In railway use it is the control a driver moves to set the power: Cecil J. Allen, writing in Modern Railways in 1963, notes that nothing more can be squeezed from the locomotive once the master controller is moved to "full on." Engineers usually name such a device by what it governs or where it ranks (a motor controller, a master controller) since the bare word says little on its own.
- 5A mechanism that controls or regulates the operation of a machine, especially of a computer's peripheral devices.
The technician replaced the disk controller, and the server could read its drives again.
The motherboard has a built-in USB controller that manages every device plugged into its ports.
Note
A computer can hold several controllers, each named for the device it runs: a disk controller for the drives, a USB controller for the ports. Keep it apart from the game controller, which a player holds; this one is built into the machine, often onto the motherboard, and does its work out of sight.
- 6The person who supervises an agent in the field and handles communication with that agent.
After the meeting, the agent sent a coded report to his controller in Vienna.
The defector claimed that his Moscow controller had ordered him to recruit a second source.
Similarhandler
Note
Espionage makes the word possessive: a controller exists only in relation to the agent they run, so it usually comes with someone attached; his controller, the agent's controller, a controller in Vienna. The division of labor is the point: the agent works in the field, and the controller directs that work and keeps the line of communication open from outside it.
- 7In software built on the model-view-controller design pattern, the part or parts that handle input and output, acting as the interface between models and views.
Each incoming request is routed to a controller, which updates the model and picks a view to render.
Keep business logic out of your controllers so they stay thin and easy to test.
Note
Here the word is one of a trio (model, view and controller) and each name makes sense only beside the other two. Unlike the hardware sense, nothing here is physical: a controller is a role that a piece of code plays, and one application may have many, each taking its own kind of input and passing the results between models and views.
- 8An iron block bolted to a ship's deck that catches the links of a chain cable as it runs out and holds them until released.
As the anchor went down, the chain rattled across the deck until the controller caught its links and held them.
The crew knocked the chain free of the controller so the cable could run out again.
- 9In grammar, the subject of a control verb, which determines who is understood as the subject of the verb's complement clause.
In "Maria promised to call," the controller is Maria, the subject of promised, so Maria is understood as the caller.
The controller here is the subject of the main clause, so the infinitive needs no subject of its own.
Note
Which noun phrase acts as controller is decided by the main verb, not by the infinitive after it. A verb that also takes an object, such as persuade, often hands the role to that object: in persuade him to stay, he is the one who stays. When the main verb takes no object, the controller is its subject.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of controller apart? Answer 3 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origin
From Middle English countreroller, from Anglo-Norman contreroulour and Middle French contreroleur (modern French contrôleur), from Medieval Latin contrārotulātor, from a reconstructed *contrārotulāre, which is also the source of control. It is a doublet of comptroller, and can also be read as control + -er.