meaner

Pluralmeaners

1. 1
   adjective

   Comparative of mean.

   The new manager turned out to be meaner than anyone had expected.

   Winters in the mountains are meaner than the mild ones back home.

   Note

   The comparative is formed with -er, as one-syllable adjectives usually are. More mean also occurs but is markedly less common. Meaner can carry any sense of mean: the stingy or low-minded one, or the older sense of low and base. In Ivanhoe (1952 film), the knight uses that older sense when he says surrender to Prince John would be "an even meaner death."

2. 2
   nouncountable

   Someone who intends something or has a particular meaning in mind.

   A message is never fixed by its words alone; what it says depends on its meaner as much as on its reader.

   In this view of language, speakers are not passive users of a code but active meaners, choosing among the options their language offers.

   Note

   An agent noun built on the verb, and at home in the study of language. M.A.K. Halliday and Jonathan Webster's Linguistic Studies of Text and Discourse (2006) speaks of "individual meaners" whose acts of meaning create and reshape social reality. Give it clear context in writing, because on its own it reads like the comparative of mean.

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