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terminator

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈtɜː.mɪ.neɪ.tə//
  • Canada//ˈtɝ.mɪˌneɪ.tɚ//
  • Canada/[ˈtɝ.mɪˌneɪ.ɾɚ]/
  • Australia//ˈtɜː.mɪ.næɪ.tə//
  • Australia/[ˈtɜː.mɪ.næɪ.ɾə]/

Someone who terminates or ends something, especially (in later use) an assassin or exterminator.

noun

  1. 1

    Someone who terminates or ends something, especially (in later use) an assassin or exterminator.

  2. 2

    A text character or string that serves to mark the end of a document or transmission.

  3. 3

    The line between the day side and the night side of a moon, planet or other celestial body.

    Harriot, looking at the moon, saw the irregular terminator, the highlights and shadows, the mountain ranges and valleys that Galileo had described – and he also convinced himself that he saw Galileo's imaginary crater.

    Another view captured by Wiseman shows the Earth divided by night and day. That frontier between light and darkness is known as the terminator.

  4. 4

    A DNA sequence that causes RNA transcription to cease and an mRNA transcript to break off.

  5. 5

    An electrical device that absorbs reflection at the end of a transmission line.

  6. 6

    An intelligent android created to destroy humans.

    Opposite of natural monsters there are technological monsters such as terminators, cyborgs, and robocops—all of which undermine dichotomies between the artificial and the organic, the prosthetic and the natural.

Etymology

* Partly from post-classical Latin terminator (5th century), from Latin terminō; partly from terminate + -or. * (android that kills humans): After the 1984 film The Terminator.

Forms

plural
terminators
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).