editor
Pluraleditors
- 1Someone at a newspaper, publishing house, or similar organization who edits stories, decides which ones get published, or both.
The city editor sent two reporters to the courthouse.
Every editor she pitched turned the novel down before one finally bought it.
UsageOften the editor of a paper or magazine; readers send letters to the editor for publication.
- 2A person who checks, corrects, and improves written material, especially to prepare it for publication.
A volunteer editor removed the whole section within a day.
She works as a freelance editor for three small publishers.
Note
Today the title stretches from the professional to the most casual volunteer. Ashley Rindsberg, writing about Wikipedia in 2024, describes an editor with administrator status, and the same word covers a first-day contributor.
- 3In computing, a program for creating and modifying files, especially text files.
The editor highlights syntax errors as you type.
A good editor can be extended with scripts written by its users.
Note
Here the word names software rather than a person, and its default object is plain text, hence the everyday compound text editor. Programmers judge one by how far it can be shaped to their own habits, so extensible and programmable are its compliments. EVE, the editor that came with DEC's VMS system, put the first of them in its name: Extensible VAX Editor.
Checked 6 Nov 2026 · 1 fact
- EVE is a text editor implemented using TPU. en.wikipedia.org
- 4In film and television, a person who selects, cuts, and arranges footage into a finished film or television program; a picture editor.
The editor and the director spent months in the cutting room.
An editor shapes the rhythm of a film as much as the writer shapes its words.
Similarcutter
Note
Film and television give the word to the craftsperson of the cutting room, who turns raw footage into a finished film or television program; picture editor is the fuller title. The material, not the task, sets this job apart from the newspaper editor: footage and rhythm rather than words. The same word also names the cutting-and-splicing machine, so context decides whether an editor sat at the machine or was the machine.
- 5The person responsible for editing a particular document, such as an edition or a collection of texts.
The edition's editor supplied the notes and the index.
As editor of the collected letters, she decided what to leave out.
Similarcompiler
Less common meaning
- 6A machine used for editing motion-picture film by cutting and splicing it.
Before video, home-movie makers cut their reels on an editor with a small viewing screen.
The museum's editor still runs, and visitors can splice two strips of old newsreel.
Practice
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Origin
Late Latin ēditor, built on ēditus (the perfect passive participle of ēdō, "give out, put forth, publish"), passed into Medieval Latin ēditor, the immediate source of the English word.