noun

• 1A person or thing that determines or decides something.

  ‘And the judge had an opportunity, as an independent determiner of facts, to determine whether or not she is in a persistent vegetative state.’

  More example sentences

  • ‘The judge will be the final determiner and that is in November and our panel will assemble right after this.’
  • ‘The real surprise is that in terms of total population and population density (the things I think are the biggest single determiners of whether a railway is viable or not) Los Angeles is remarkably similar to both New York and London.’
  • ‘Parents are the prime determiners of how their children feel about the world.’
  • ‘However, it may be a legitimate determiner, since physical disability may stem from, but not be limited to, the following factors: birth defect, infirmity, malformation, disfigurement, illness or bodily injury.’
  • ‘This new artistic trend has been publicized and sanctified by the great determiner of what's hot and who's who, the Whitney Biennial; by galleries across Canada and the US; and by the art sections in independent booksellers.’
  • ‘The Supreme Court of Florida, which is the ultimate determiner of Florida law, you know, literally they read the statute.’
  • ‘The tribe should be the sole determiner of membership and the Supreme Court has upheld this setup.’
  • ‘But there is a powerful class that looks upon Madurai's response as the determiner of the happenings elsewhere in the State.’
  • ‘The second, almost a throwaway, notes that a rise in net income isn't the only determiner of whether you've moved up.’
  • ‘It received mixed reviews, possibly because it is reasonable to focus upon the actors as the main determiner of success.’
  • ‘You don't have, in your heart, a guiding determiner between what is right and wrong.’
  • ‘They are really acting like they are the sole determiner of American foreign policy.’
  • ‘The determiner of whether something should be legalised is surely ‘is it right’?’
  • ‘Todorov, Jauss and Culler all decentre the text (and by implication, I think, author intention) as the determiner of genre, and introduce the idea that genres are formed in relation to reader reception and expectation.’
  • ‘Your tension that you have outlined particularly was in terms of being that visible operational leader and determiner of the future in some ways, combined with - or as opposed to the general day-to-day perhaps running of the business.’
  • ‘In this case, as in the many other peaks and valleys of economic history, B.C. was not sole determiner of its fate, nor is it likely to be in the future.’
  • ‘Hannah's words act as a determiner of Sula's defiance.’

  Synonyms

  judge, authority, determiner, controller, director, governor, master, expert, pundit, critic

• 2Grammar
  A modifying word that determines the kind of reference a noun or noun group has, for example a, the, every.

  See also article

  ‘The idea that the determiner heads a noun phrase might seem counterintuitive to some readers.’

  More example sentences

  • ‘I'm no kind of expert on translation, but if they'd asked me, I would have been tempted to nominate some morphological category like inchoative, or some preposition or determiner.’
  • ‘In this intermediate period, especially indefinite determiners seem to be distributed in a quite clear cut way according to the specificity of the referents introduced by the respective noun phrases.’
  • ‘It's not true that determiners are always atomic, certainly - it's normal for them to show gender and number agreement, of course, and there are some other sorts of morphologically complex determiners as well.’
  • ‘Every noun phrase has a particular curve associated with it that is described by a lowering of pitch after the determiner and then a rise again after the noun.’