selector

English

Etymology

From select +‎ -or.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /sɪˈlɛktə(ɹ)/

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɛktə(ɹ)

Noun

selector (plural selectors)

1. Someone or something which selects or chooses.
   • 1949, Billboard, volume 61, number 34, page 97:

     There is one selection for hot chocolate. All selectors are the push button type.

2. (cricket) An administrator responsible for selecting which players will play for a side.
3. (computing) A matching expression in a stylesheet determining which elements in the markup are affected by a style.
   • 2007, Craig Cook, David Schultz, Beginning HTML with CSS and XHTML, Apress, →ISBN, page 28:

     The ID selector targets just one element per page, making it much more specific than a class selector that might target many.

   • 2009, Dino Esposito, Microsoft ASP.NET and AJAX, Microsoft Press, →ISBN, page 140:

     The selector indicates the query expression to run over the DOM; the context indicates the portion of the DOM from which to run the query.

4. (computing) A pointer to a structure describing a segment of memory.
   • 1990, Byte, volume 15, numbers 11-13, page 256:

     Phar Lap executables […] provide a protected-mode selector, 34h, that maps to the first megabyte of physical memory.

   • 1995, Lary L. Myers, Keith Weiskamp, Amazing 3-D games adventure set, page 235:

     You will only have to be concerned with DPMI, selectors, and such, if you use Borland C++ in DOS.

5. (Internet, historical) A text string transmitted to a Gopher server, identifying the resource to be retrieved.

   Coordinate term: URL

   • 1996, Kenneth H. Rosen, UNIX System V, Release 4: An Introduction, McGraw-Hill Osborne Media, page 438:

     Gopher selector strings are more liberal in makeup than URLs and may contain any characters other than a tab, return, or linefeed.

6. (music) A disc jockey.
   • 2009, “Medicine Ball”, in Relapse, performed by Eminem:

     That's my sector, homosexual dissector / Come again, rewind selector

   • 2011, Julian Henriques, Sonic Bodies, A&C Black, →ISBN, page 125:

     This sonic body has to decide which music track to play at any particular moment. But when the selector is alone in front of the crowd, how do they know which track to play next?

7. (Australia, historical) A person who is entitled to choose a tract of Crown land to purchase.
   • 1887, Harriet W. Daly, Digging, Squatting, and Pioneering Life in the Northern Territory of South Australia, page 78:

     Each selector in turn chose the particular allotment he wanted for his client, and so on till this important work was over.

Derived terms

• co-selector
• selectorial
• uniselector
• variation selector

 

Translations

someone or something which selects or chooses

• Portuguese: selecionador m

text string identifying a Gopher resource to be retrieved

• Kazakh: селектор (selektor), іріктегіш (ırıktegış)
• Maori: pūtīpako

Anagrams

• Electors, corelets, corselet, electors, electros

Romanian

Etymology

Borrowed from French sélecteur.

Noun

selector n (plural selectoare)

1. selector

Declension

Declension of selector

	singular		plural
	indefinite articulation	definite articulation	indefinite articulation	definite articulation
nominative/accusative	(un) selector	selectorul	(niște) selectoare	selectoarele
genitive/dative	(unui) selector	selectorului	(unor) selectoare	selectoarelor
vocative	selectorule		selectoarelor

Spanish

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /seleɡˈtoɾ/ [se.leɣ̞ˈt̪oɾ]
• Rhymes: -oɾ
• Syllabification: se‧lec‧tor

Adjective

selector (feminine selectora, masculine plural selectores, feminine plural selectoras)

1. selecting

Noun

selector m (plural selectores)

1. selector

Further reading

• “selector”, in Diccionario de la lengua española [Dictionary of the Spanish Language] (in Spanish), 23rd edition, Royal Spanish Academy, 2014 October 16