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starter

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈstɑː.tə(ɹ)//
  • United States//ˈstɑɹ.tɚ//
  • United States/[ˈstɑɹ.ɾɚ]/

Someone who starts, or who starts something.

noun

  1. 1

    Someone who starts, or who starts something.

    The most charitable view taken of them by their colleagues was that, as late starters on the journey away from their Labour past, they had not fully understood that the SDP intended to be something new and not just a Mark II Labour Party […]

  2. 2

    Someone who starts, or who starts something. The person who starts a race by firing a gun or waving a flag.

  3. 3

    Someone who starts, or who starts something. A starting pitcher.

  4. 4

    Someone who starts, or who starts something. A person employed to take new players to the first tee at suitable intervals, and to provide them with caddies and equipment.

  5. 5

    Something that starts something. An electric motor that starts an internal combustion engine.

  6. 6

    Something that starts something. A device that initiates the flow of high voltage electricity in a fluorescent lamp.

  7. 7

    Something that starts something. A yeast culture, or a medium containing one, used to start a fermentation process.

  8. 8

    Something with which to begin; a first property, etc.

    It's small, but it's a good starter house.

  9. 9

    The first course of a meal, consisting of a small, usually savoury, dish.

    “Starters are the best things at restaurants,” agrees Chitra Ramaswamy, the restaurant critic for the Scottish edition of the Times, who lives in Edinburgh. […] I would never go to a restaurant and not have a starter.”

  10. 10

    A player in the lineup of players that a team fields at the beginning of a game.

    Goalkeeper Paulo Gazzaniga wasn’t a starter at Fulham.

  11. 11

    A dog that rouses game.

  12. 12

    historicalA short length of rope formerly used for casual chastisement in the Navy.

  13. 13

    Variant of starter signalEllipsis of starter signal.

    The colour-light signals admitting directly to the platforms and the inner starters (for short-length departures well up the platforms) are two-aspect, while those immediately beyond them are three-aspect, but elsewhere four-aspect signals have been installed in association with route indicators.

Etymology

From start + -er.

Forms

plural
starters
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).