iˈdentifier
[f. identify + -er1.]
1. a. One who identifies.
| 1889 Evening Disp. (Columbus, Ohio) 11 May, It was finally determined that the prisoner, attorneys and identifiers should step into a side room. 1959 E. Fenwick Long Way Down ii. 15 Where the hell's your identifier? |
b. One who identifies himself with a cause, group, etc.
| 1966 New Statesman 8 July 56/3 He [sc. Mark Twain] lacked the moral or imaginative resources of other identifiers, like Dickens or Balzac. |
2. a. That which identifies.
| 1894 ‘Mark Twain’ in Century Mag. June 237/2 There was never a twin..that did not carry from birth to death a sure identifier. 1907 Yesterday's Shopping (1969) 633/2 Gamekeepers' identifiers{ddd}will burn for a period of 3 to 4 minutes. 1973 A. Quinton Nature of Things iii. 61 The view that the identity of things through time is due to the presence in them of an identifying component or substance, an identifier, as I shall call it. |
b. Linguistics. A linguistic element that has the function of identifying.
| 1946 [see descriptor]. 1965 Language XLI. 73 The noun phrase..may be regarded as a string consisting of identifier tagmeme, manifested here by a.; [etc.]. |
c. Computers. A sequence of characters arbitrarily devised to identify or refer to a set of data, a location in a store, or a point in a program.
| 1958 Communications Assoc. Computing Machinery Dec. 11 Strings of letters and figures enclosed by delimiters represent new entities. However, only two types of such strings are admissible: 1. Strings consisting of figures ζ only represent the (positive) integers G (including o) with the conventional meaning. 2. Strings beginning with a letter λ followed by arbitrary letters λ and/or figures ζ are called identifiers. They have no inherent meaning, but serve for identifying purposes only. 1960 Computer Jrnl. III. 67/2 An identifier may be used in an ALGOL 60 program as a simple variable. This means that the program, when ultimately translated and run on a computer, will associate a particular storage location with that identifier. The number held in this store at any stage in the calculation is called the current value of the variable. 1962 R. V. Oakford Introd. Electronic Data Processing Equipment vii. 245 An input declaration defines one or more input-data sets, each of which is given a name in the form of an identifier. 1967 Cox & Grose Organiz. Bibliogr. Rec. by Computer 11. 19 Such a file sequence carried an 8-character identifier and a sequence-number. 1968 Corlett & Tinsley Pract. Programming ii. 14 Reference is made to the memory of a computer by giving names or identifiers to variables... Identifiers are also used to denote labels which mark particular points in a program. 1973 Computers & Humanities VII. 144 The first ten columns contain identifiers for manuscript, book, question, and line number. |