visitor
Pluralvisitors
- 1A person who comes to see someone else, or who stays with them as a guest.
Our visitor arrived just as dinner was being served.
She welcomed the visitors into her home and offered them tea.
Oppositehost
Note
Two older words meet in this one: Middle English visiter, simply visit plus -er, and visitour, borrowed through Anglo-Norman from Old French. The -or spelling is the one that settled, though Poe's "The Raven" (1845) still has "'Tis some visiter" tapping at the chamber door. The guest need not be welcome, or even living: Dickens gives Scrooge a supernatural visitor, its chain wound about its arm.
- 2
- 3A player or team that is playing away from home, against the host side.
The visitors held on for a narrow win at a hostile stadium.
As the visitor, the club had to travel three hundred miles for the match.
Oppositehost
Note
A sports-desk word, and nearly always plural: a single club becomes "the visitors," as when Peter Scrivener's BBC Sport report of Sunderland 1-3 Wolverhampton (2011) has Craddock firing the visitors ahead. The plural speaks of the side as a traveling group, and it pairs naturally with the home side as its opposite. The singular is mostly used for one competitor rather than a team.
- 4A being from another planet that is present on Earth.
Witnesses claimed a visitor had stepped out of the craft and studied them in silence.
Ufologists catalog reported encounters with visitors from other worlds.
Similaralien, extraterrestrial
Note
Ufology's neutral term: calling a being a visitor says where it came from without saying what it wants. That openness lets writers fear it, as Chris Boyce does in Extraterrestrial Encounter (1979), imagining nuclear warheads sent out upon the visitor, or credit it with pure altruism, like the visitor in Man Facing South-east. Reports of a pilot sent to identify a "strange visitor" keep the same caution.
- 5A natural object from space that passes by Earth or its orbit, or lands on the planet.
The comet was a rare visitor, returning only once every few thousand years.
Many such visitors burn up in the atmosphere before reaching the ground.
Note
Here the word stretches from people to things, a gentle personification: James Merrill Safford's Geology of Tennessee (1869) calls a three-pound meteoric stone a "recent visitor." Comets earn the name too. When an object is imagined as sent rather than simply arriving, the word slides toward the alien being, as in John Philip Cohane's Paradox (1977), where a satellite is a visitor dispatched by "superior beings."
- 6An official with the authority to inspect an institution and make sure it is being run as it should be.
The appointed visitor reviewed the charity's records during the annual inspection.
Statutory visitors have authority to enter and examine the institution at any time.
Note
A legal office with a definite holder. Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) explains that for charitable corporations the founder and his heirs are by common right the legal visitors, there to see that the endowment is rightly employed. The visitor here is a guardian with standing, not a guest. The role shades into the British college overseer, which carries the same title inside particular institutions.
- 7In Britain, an official head or overseer of an institution such as a college, cathedral, or hospital, who resolves disputes and performs ceremonial duties.
When the fellows could not agree, the visitor was called upon to rule on the matter.
As visitor to the cathedral, the bishop gave the address at the founding anniversary.
Note
A title of British institutional life rather than a description of anyone's movements: the visitor of a college, cathedral or hospital holds a standing office and is not passing through. At a college the role corresponds to the university's chancellor. The work is part arbiter, part figurehead, settling disputes the institution cannot resolve internally and speaking on ceremonial occasions.
- 8In software design, the object in the visitor pattern that performs an operation on each element of a structure in turn.
The visitor traverses every node in the syntax tree and computes its value.
Adding a feature meant writing a fresh visitor rather than editing the element classes.
Note
A software engineer's borrowing that keeps the everyday picture: the visitor calls on each element of a structure in turn and does its work there, while the elements themselves stay unchanged. That is the point of the design. A new operation means writing a new visitor rather than editing every element class, which is why the word nearly always travels with its phrase, the visitor pattern.
Practice
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Origin
The word comes partly from Middle English 'visiter', formed from 'visit' plus the ending '-er', and partly from Middle English 'visitour', borrowed from Anglo-Norman 'visitour', which in turn came from Old French 'visetëor'. By surface analysis it can be read as 'visit' plus '-or'.