planer

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. One that planes, especially a machine tool that is used to smooth or finish the surfaces of wood or metal.
2. n. Printing A smooth block of wood used to level a form of type.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. A tool for planing wood; a plane; also, a plan-ing-machine.
2. n. A utensil for smoothing or leveling salt in salt-cellars.
3. n. In printing, a block of wood, about 9 inches long, 3½ wide, and 3 high, on the top of which is a strip of leather, by means of which the projecting types of a form are beaten down to a level by blows of a mallet.
4. n. A power-tool of the largest class for planing massive pieces of metal which can be surfaced or machined by a cutting-tool working in a straight line. Its essential features are a long and narrow bed, on which slides the work-table; massive uprights, called the housings, on each side of the table and tied together at the top; and a cross-rail, gibbed to the housing and spanning the bed, carrying one or two tool-heads, and with a vertical traverse on the housings. In principle it is related to the lathe, in the sense that the work advances against a fixed cutting-tool. It differs from the lathe in the presentation of the work to the tool in a horizontal plane, and from the shaper, slotting-machine, and key-seater in respect to the direction of the effort of the cutting-tool and in the fact that in these machines the work is at rest while the cutting-tool moves; but all five machines are essentially tools making a planer cut, as opposed to the chipping cut of a milling-machine. The important feature of the planer is the mechanism for operating the traveling work-table. A typical method is by rack and gear. The advance of the work-table carrying the work against and under the cutting-tool held in the cutter-head is slow and powerful; the return of the table under the idle cutter is four times as fast. The feed-motion applied to the cutter-heads gives a cross-feed for those supported by the cross-rail. Where other cutter-heads are supported, one on each side of the uprights of the housing, they are given a vertical feed. By the use of four cutter-heads, two on the cross-rail and two on the uprights, four cuts can be made at each stroke.
5. n. In geology, a series of limestones, marls, shales, sandstones, and conglomerates representing the littoral facies of both the lower members (Cenomanian and Turonian) of the Cretaceous system in northeastern Germany. Many of the component beds are highly fossiliferous and contain chiefly ammonites, echinoderms, pelecypods, and brachiopods.

Wiktionary

1. adj. comparative form of plane: more plane
2. n. A woodworking tool which smooths a surface or makes one surface of a workpiece parallel to the tool's bed.
3. n. A large machine tool in which the workpiece is traversed linearly (by means of a reciprocating bed) beneath a single-point cutting tool. (Analogous to a shaper but larger and with the workpiece moving instead of the tool.) Planers can generate various shapes, but were most especially used to generate large, accurate flat surfaces. The planer is nowadays obsolescent, having been mostly superseded by large milling machines.
4. n. archaic, printing A wooden block used for forcing down the type in a form, and making the surface even.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. One who, or that which, planes; a planing machine; esp., a machine for planing wood or metals.
2. n. (Print.) A wooden block used for forcing down the type in a form, and making the surface even.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. a power tool for smoothing or shaping wood