1A person or thing that makes partial or minor changes to something.
‘mood modifiers like Valium and Lithium’
‘‘Chocolate is a potent mood modifier,’ says the author.’
‘OK, so there's no way a sea breeze is a classic cocktail, but since it conforms to the classic rule - a single spirit base and two modifiers - we'll allow it.’
‘Some eastern Albertan farmers hold weather modifiers responsible for further disrupting the natural water cycles and dehydrating their already parched land.’
‘This is a serious look at America's extreme body modifiers - think tongue splitting, elective amputation and the like.’
‘We've hired therapists and behavioral modifiers, parent effectiveness training.’
‘Corporate food modifiers go around in lab coats and play with petri-dishes and DNA.’
‘When a modified work were downloaded or streamed, both the creator of the original work and the modifier would get a share of the resultant revenue.’
1.1Grammar A word, especially an adjective or noun used attributively, that restricts or adds to the sense of a head noun (e.g. good and family in a good family house).
‘This is possible because moving can function as an attributive modifier of the head noun pianos.’
‘Proper nouns can: when we talk about London fog, we are using London (a proper noun) as an attributive modifier of the noun fog.’
‘Although the modifier in a noun phrase will often be an adjective, it doesn't have to be.’
‘They have to deal with the here and now and be composed of strong nouns and verbs; rarely are there modifiers, such as adjectives or adverbs.’
‘In many of these languages, nouns are composed of modifiers known as prefixes, infixes, and suffixes.’
‘Far from being ungrammatical, split infinitives are always an option for modifiers of infinitival clauses, and sometimes the only option.’
1.2Genetics A gene which modifies the phenotypic expression of a gene at another locus.
‘This was explained by the action of rare alleles of autosomal modifiers that can influence or override the sex chromosome genes.’
‘These results demonstrate the existence of a class of modifiers of gene expression whose effects are associated with transient changes in DNA methylation of specific loci.’
‘The change in allele frequency at the modifier locus during diploid selection is given by Recombination.’
‘Consequentially, once the allele attains a significant frequency, the evolution of modifiers that force the gene to be expressed only in males is expected.’
‘Whenever possible, the interactions were confirmed with additional alleles of each putative modifier gene.’
‘This shows that the modifier gene did not affect Compact trait expression in the female.’
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