A person, system, or tool that organizes things into classes or categories; in linguistics, a word that categorizes nouns.
From 'classify' plus '-er' (agent noun). Used scientifically since the 18th century; gained linguistic meaning in the 20th century.
In Mandarin Chinese, the word for 'one book' literally means 'one-CLASSIFIER-book' where the classifier tells you what shape the object is—a fascinating reminder that we all categorize, just some languages shout it out loud.
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