receiver
Pluralreceivers
- 1The earpiece part of a telephone handset, or the handset itself, held to the ear to hear and speak.
He lifted the receiver and dialed the number from memory.
Static on the receiver made the caller almost impossible to hear.
Similarhandset, earpiece, phone
Note
The meaning slid from the earpiece to the whole handset, so lifting the receiver simply means picking up the phone. The verbs that go with it are physical: lift, pick up, take down, put down, replace. In Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Return of Tarzan (1913), Paulvitch "took down the receiver of their telephone" before calling a number.
- 2An electronic device that picks up electromagnetic waves or transmitted signals, such as a radio or television set.
The satellite receiver decodes the broadcast before sending it to the screen.
Engineers tuned the receiver to filter out background noise.
Similartuner
Oppositetransmitter
Note
Its natural partner is transmitter: one sends the signal and the other picks it up, and the pair runs through radio and electronics. The word is usually narrowed by a modifier naming the band or source, such as a VHF receiver or a satellite receiver. Boating magazine, reporting in 1976 on complaints about VHF receivers, slips easily into calling them sets.
- 3An attacking player who catches forward passes thrown by a teammate during a play.
The quarterback found his receiver wide open in the corner.
Defenders shadowed every receiver downfield to break up the pass.
Note
A position on an American football offense, where the word names a player rather than a device. Wide receivers are the specialists in catching passes. Keep it apart from the player returning serve: there the receiver answers an opponent's serve, while here the receiver takes a teammate's throw.
- 4
- 5A person or company appointed to take charge of and settle the affairs of an insolvent business.
A receiver was appointed to wind down the failing firm.
Creditors petitioned the court for a receiver to manage the company's assets.
Similaradministrator, liquidator
Note
A legal role, not a job one applies for: receivers are appointed, and that verb almost always travels with them. Trains Illustrated, writing in 1961 of a struggling railway, notes that "a receiver had been appointed in 1884." The same role goes by other titles, among them liquidator, administrator, insolvency practitioner and trustee in bankruptcy.
- 6The part of a firearm that contains the action: the mechanism that loads, fires, and ejects the cartridge.
Like the chassis of a car, onto which all the other components are mounted.
The serial number is stamped on the receiver, just above the trigger group.
Machining the receiver from a solid block of aluminum improves the rifle's durability.
Note
Gunsmiths use the word for the housing that holds a firearm's working parts: the bolt, the trigger group and the feed system. The term matters beyond the workshop. Under US law, the receiver is itself classified as the firearm for regulatory and serialization purposes, which is why the serial number is stamped there.
- 7The player who attempts to return the serve in a racquet sport.
The receiver waited near the baseline for a fast serve.
A skilled receiver reads the server's toss early.
Oppositeserver
Note
Racquet sports pair the word with server: every point begins with one player serving and the other receiving. In tennis, the receiver stands diagonally across the court and faces a ball delivered into the service box. A player is receiver for a game, not permanently, because the roles alternate.
- 8A person who knowingly accepts or deals in stolen goods.
Investigators traced the stolen jewelry to a known receiver.
The receiver resold the loot through a string of pawn shops.
Similarfence
- 9An object or container that receives and holds some substance or object; a receptacle.
The funnel directs the liquid into a glass receiver below.
Each coin slides down the chute into the receiver.
Similarreceptacle, container, vessel
- 10A vessel used to receive and hold the products of distillation, or to contain gases.
Vapor cooled in the condenser and collected in the receiver.
The chemist sealed the receiver to trap the volatile product.
Note
A piece of laboratory glassware at the end of a distillation. It is the vessel joined to the condenser, where the distillate gathers as it cools, or one that holds gases drawn off a reaction. Chemists speak of a product collecting "in the receiver." Do not confuse it with the air-pump vessel, which is emptied rather than filled.
- 11A sealed vessel from which the air is pumped out in order to form a vacuum.
Boyle sealed the specimen within the receiver and worked the pump until little air remained.
A man can live in thick air, but perishes in an exhausted receiver.
1791, James Boswell, Life of JohnsonNote
Early natural philosophy's word for the glass vessel on an air pump. The phrase to know is an exhausted receiver, meaning one pumped empty of air, not one that is tired. Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791) has it: "A man can live in thick air, but perishes in an exhausted receiver." The term now belongs chiefly to the history of science.
- 12An official whose duty was to collect taxes or other public monies; a tax collector or treasurer.
The receiver recorded every payment of rent and tax in his ledger.
Villagers grumbled when the receiver demanded the full sum in coin.
Note
The oldest office the word names now belongs to history. The word came into English as Middle English receyvour, from Anglo-Norman receverre, and only later was it reshaped as receive plus -er. Use it for officials of the past who took in taxes or other monies. In modern settings, the money-handling sense survives mainly in the insolvency appointment.
- 13An intermediate chamber that stores the exhaust steam leaving the high-pressure cylinder until it passes into the low-pressure cylinder of a compound steam engine.
Exhaust steam passed into the receiver, then expanded again in the low-pressure cylinder.
A fault in the receiver upset the balance between the two cylinders.
Note
Part of the plumbing of the compound steam engine, and now a historical term. The receiver sits between the two cylinders as a reservoir. It takes steam that has already done work once and buffers its flow and pressure, so the low-pressure cylinder can expand it again. Writers on old engines use it; modern engineering rarely needs it.
- 14A type of swaption that gives its holder the right to enter a swap in which they receive the fixed leg and pay the floating leg.
The fund held a receiver to gain if long-term rates declined.
Traders priced the receiver using a model of future rate movements.
Oppositepayer
Note
Traders use it as shorthand for a swaption named after the leg its holder would receive, the fixed one. Exercising it is a right, not an obligation. Because the holder would lock in a fixed rate, the option gains value as interest rates fall. That is why a fund buys one as a position on declining rates.
Practice
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Origin
Inherited from Middle English receyvour, from Anglo-Norman receverre or receivour, and later also reformed as receive plus the suffix -er.