Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Any of various instruments for comparing a measured property of an object, such as its shape, color, or brightness, with a standard.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. An apparatus for making comparisons; especially, an instrument for comparing the lengths of nearly equal bars, either from end to end or between lines engraved upon them. The usual optical comparator has two microscopes, firmly attached to a bar or something of that sort, with their focal planes coincident and furnished with filar micrometers, whose screws lie virtually in one right line. There is also a carriage moving at right angles to the screws, so as to bring first one bar and then another under the microscopes. In Saxton's comparator a beam of light is caused to fall on a mirror delicately supported on its axis, round which a very fine chain is wound, the other end being attached to a lever provided with a spring in such a way that the mirror is turned one way or the other as the bar contracts or expands, or is replaced by a shorter or longer bar. The mirror throws the beam upon a large scale at some distance, where it indicates by a large movement the very minute movements of the mirror. One form of color-comparator employs a glass prism, which may be filled with a colored liquid, and a series of glass tubes containing colored solutions of known tints and shades.
- n. A vessel in which liquid is kept rapidly stirred and at a uniform constant temperature so that thermometers immersed in it must all be maintained at the same temperature. Simultaneous readings of the secondary thermometers and the standard are made, and the corrections to the former are thus determined for a wide range of temperatures.
Wiktionary
- n. Any device for comparing a physical property of two objects, or an object with a standard.
- n. An electronic device that compares two voltages, currents or streams of data.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. (Physics) An instrument or machine for comparing anything to be measured with a standard measure; -- applied especially to a machine for comparing standards of length.
Examples
“This multicenter, double blind, randomized, repeat dose placebo controlled study will include an open label comparator arm and will evaluate approximately 90 postmenopausal osteoporotic women for a period of 24 weeks.”
“The control arm is also called the "comparator arm.”
“Ten years ago, suits against mothers were often stymied because courts could not find a suitable "comparator" -- a similarly situated pregnant man.”
The Huffington Post: Joan Williams: Bloomberg Case: Open Season to Discriminate Against Mothers?
“A comparator is an instrument for comparing a measurement with a standard.”
“This little nugget of what you call reality then arrives at a device that engineers call a comparator.”
“On the other hand, if the API says the sort method takes a "comparator" block, it gives the developer much more knowledge on what the block's responsibility is and what parameters to expect without having to read through the code.”
“The British legal claims say 3M used a different comparator to test BacLite than the one it told the FDA it would use and which had been successfully used in Europe, and kept samples overnight at the wrong temperatures.”
“History will have to judge how it compares to other such episodes (McCarthyism would make a fascinating comparator).”
“Since no university wants its faculty paid in the bottom half of their comparator group, the effect of every survey is to raise average salaries.”
“The government can, by regulation once again, restrict the comparator jobs upon which compensation assessment can be based (s. 4 [5] d).”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘comparator’.
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A-R-A Words
It's an odd-looking pattern in English. Please add words if it makes you happy. :) K-POW! Wow @gulyasrobi!
scarab, Arawak, Sahara, Arab, pharaoh, caravan, carat, parachute, arachnid, Saran Wrap, Sarah, tarantella and 492 more...
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Mirrored Vowels
Rules:
• The word must have an even number of vowels.
• There must be four or more vowels; thus, at minimum, an A-A-A-A or A-B-B-A pattern.
• The vowels must appear in a mir...feminine, solicitor, caruncular, repackager, semiprimes, fetishises, decomposer, demonlover, recomposer, sepultures, lipotropic, colesterol and 385 more...
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INTERP - terminology management terms
Terms from the fields of terminology, lexicography, lexicology and corpus linguistics
reworder, rewording, parser, parsing, tagger, tagging, aligner, aligning, content analysis, content analyzer, corpus management, glossary and 546 more...
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Brochettes of Random Palavery
Another of my random palavery lists for words or phrases that haven't yet found a place in one or more of my other lists.
nonexclusivity, adaptationist, paxillin, adduct, unblushingly cribbed, ptomaïne, microsievert, millisievert, too big to jail, tastemaker, tinsmithing, Nimzo-Indian and 1616 more...
Tweets
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