compositor

C3O1M3P3O1S1I1T1O1R1
/kəmˈpɒzɪtə(ɹ)/

noun

A person who sets type; a typesetter.

“I work as an image compositor.”

UncommonScrabble 16

Meanings

nouncompositor (plural compositors)

plural compositors

  1. A person who sets type; a typesetter.

    All Spaniards, we discovered, knew two English expressions. One was 'O.K., baby', the other was a word used by the Barcelona whores in their dealings with English sailors, and I am afraid the compositors would not print it.

    1938 April, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter IV, in Homage to Catalonia, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC
    2 more examples

    Thus, when he drew up instructions in lawyer language […] his clerks […] understood him very well. If he had written a love letter, or a farce, or a ballade, or a story, no one, either clerks, or friends, or compositors, would have understood anything but a word here and a word there.

    1892, Walter Besant, “Prologue: Who is Edmund Gray?”, in The Ivory Gate […], New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […], →OCLC

    However late medieval copyists were supervised — and controls were much more lax than many accounts suggest — scribes were incapable of committing the sort of "standardized" error that was produced by a compositor who dropped the word "not" from the Seventh Commandment and thus created the "wicked" Bible of 1631.

    1983, Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, Second edition, 2005, p. 56
  2. One who, or that which, composes or sets in order.

    I work as an image compositor.

  3. computer graphicsA system that puts images together in a buffer (such as individual windows on a desktop) to generate a final display image.

Synonyms & antonyms

nounone who sets written material into type

Broader

Synonym sets from Open English WordNet, CC BY 4.0.

Origin

  1. Latincompositor
  2. Frenchcompositeur
  3. Englishcompositor

From French compositeur, from Latin compositor.

Full word history & related roots →
Cite this entry
APA

compositor. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 2, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/compositor

MLA

“compositor.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/compositor. Accessed November 2, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “compositor,” accessed November 2, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/compositor.

Source: compositor on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.