Other forms: cleaners
A cleaner is the person paid to clean a place: mopping the office floor at six in the morning, emptying the bins, vacuuming a hotel corridor while the guests sleep. Most of Europe calls the job cleaner; in the United States you hear janitor or cleaning lady.
A cleaner is also a product — oven cleaner, drain cleaner, glass cleaner, the bottle under the sink with a trigger on top. The dry cleaner's, or just the cleaners, is the shop that cleans clothes with chemicals: my suit is at the cleaners. That shop gives the idiom take someone to the cleaners, meaning to take every penny they have, in a card game or a divorce. And cleaner is simply the comparative of clean — the kitchen is cleaner than it was — so one word can be a person with a mop, a liquid, a shop, or an adjective.
1nouncleanerA person whose job is cleaning offices, homes or other buildings.~19%
“The cleaner comes on Tuesdays and does the whole flat in two hours.”
2nounliquidA liquid or powder used for cleaning something.~61%
“Spray the oven cleaner on and leave it for ten minutes.”
3nounshopA shop that cleans clothes with chemicals rather than water.~2%
“I dropped the coat at the cleaner's on the way in.”
4adjectiveelseMore clean than something else.~18%
“The air is cleaner up here than in the city.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 17 sentences found in the wild and placed 16 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
cleaner is a job.
Cleaner is Middle English clener: clean with -er stuck on the end. That ending does two jobs in English at once. It names the person who does the thing, as in baker and teacher, and it makes the comparative, as in colder and greener. Cleaner landed in both jobs, which is why the same seven letters can mean a person with a bucket or a floor with less dirt on it.
Middle English
clener
English, today
cleaner
Middle English clener, clenere, equivalent to clean + -er.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA