coordinator
Pluralcoordinators
- 1A person or thing that coordinates, organizing separate people, parts, or activities so that they work together.
Hospital discharge coordinators arrange home care, equipment, and follow-up visits before patients go home.
In the database cluster, one server acts as the coordinator, telling the others when to commit each transaction.
Note
The general agent noun, built from coordinate + -or, of which the other meanings are special cases: the assistant coach coordinates one facet of a team's play, and the grammatical term names words that coordinate phrases or clauses. Here it fits people and machines alike. In job titles it follows what is coordinated, as in a discharge coordinator or a project coordinator, and the compound is written as two words.
- 2An assistant coach responsible for one aspect of a team's play, such as the defense, the offense, or special teams.
Like a department head who runs one division of a company while the chief executive oversees everything.
The defensive coordinator called for an aggressive blitz on third down.
After two losing seasons, the club replaced both of its coordinators.
Note
A sports title that narrows the everyday sense of someone who coordinates, and its home is chiefly American football. It nearly always travels with a modifier naming the unit: offensive coordinator, defensive coordinator, special teams coordinator. The bare word turns up mostly once the unit is already clear, or in the plural for the whole group of unit chiefs who answer to the head coach.
- 3A word from the grammatical class that links two or more items of equal syntactic rank, such as words, phrases, or clauses.
Like an equals sign that joins two values of the same weight.
The coordinator 'or' connects the two clauses without making either one subordinate.
English has a small set of coordinators, including 'and,' 'but,' and 'or.'
Oppositesubordinator
Note
The grammarian's compact name for what is often called a coordinating conjunction. It pairs naturally with subordinator. A coordinator joins items as equals, as and does in tea and toast. A subordinator such as because makes one clause depend on another. A quick test: items linked by a coordinator can usually swap places without the sentence becoming ungrammatical.
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Origin
Formed from the word "coordinate" combined with the suffix "-or".