planer
Pluralplaners
Pluralplaners
- 1A tool that smooths a surface or makes one face of a workpiece parallel to its bed.
Carpenters ran the rough plank over the planer to true up its surface.
The workshop kept two planers for shaping cabinet panels.
Similarthicknesser
Note
The woodworker's sense, built transparently in Middle English from plane plus -er: the thing that planes. Two jobs hide in it. One is smoothing a rough face. The other is truing, which leaves a board's face parallel to the reference face held against the bed, the work thickness models are made for. A rough plank goes in, and a board with a true, even face comes out.
- 2A person employed to operate a planer, the woodworking tool that smooths wood or makes one face of it parallel to the tool's bed.
The mill employed a skilled planer to prepare each plank by hand.
As a planer, he could judge a board's grain at a glance.
- 3A large machine tool in which the workpiece moves back and forth on a reciprocating bed beneath a single-point cutting tool, used especially to make large, accurate flat surfaces.
Each slow pass of the planer shaved a thin layer from the cast-iron bed.
The old planer reciprocated steadily, drawing the workpiece under the fixed cutter.
Note
A machine-shop word whose key fact is which part moves: on a planer the workpiece rides back and forth under a fixed cutter, while on a shaper the cutter does the traveling over still work. Planers were built big, for long, accurate flat surfaces, and Some Memories of Crewe Works (1944) lists them beside millers and lathes. Today the job mostly falls to large milling machines.
- 4Comparative form of plane. Rare; flatter is the usual word.
Note
A spelling collision. The comparative of the adjective plane, "flat or level," looks exactly like the noun for the smoothing tool but comes from a separate word, and only the sentence shows which is meant. Planer here describes a surface that is more nearly level. In everyday English, flatter is the more usual choice.
Less common meaning
- 5A wooden block used for forcing the type down in a printing form and making its surface even.
Before locking the form, the compositor ran the planer across every line of type.
A few taps on the planer seated the loose letters evenly.
Note
A block from the hand-press composing room, named for its action. In Thomas Curson Hansard's Typographia (1825), the compositor "planes down" the forme by striking a mallet on a piece of smooth wood "called, from its use, a planer." The verb and the block belong together, and Hansard spells the type frame forme. The word is archaic, so it suits writing about the history of hand typesetting rather than current printing.
Showing meanings only.
planer is a form of plane
plane, adjective: Of a surface, lying perfectly flat and level throughout. Full entry
- Spelling
- plane → planer: add -r
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English planer or planere, equivalent to "plane" combined with the suffix "-er".