Other forms: drivers
The driver is the one at the wheel. The bus driver who waits until you have sat down, the taxi driver who knows a way round the roadworks, the lorry driver asleep in the cab at a service station.
Anyone who works a vehicle is its driver — car, bus, tractor, train — and on the railway the driver sits in the cab at the front, a job Americans call an engineer. Away from the road the word means whatever is pushing something along: rising rents are the main driver of the shortage, and a driver is also the small piece of software that lets your computer talk to a printer. In golf it is the club you swing off the tee. One trap: the licence and the test are driving licence and driving test in Britain, never driver test, though an American writes driver's license.
1noundriverThe person operating a car, bus, lorry, or train.~82%
“The driver waited at the lights with the engine off.”
synonyms: motorist, chauffeur
2nouncausesThe thing that causes something or pushes it forward.~6%
“Cheap flights were the biggest driver of the change.”
3nounprogramA program that lets a computer control a printer, a card, or another piece of hardware.~10%
“You will need to install a driver before the printer works.”
4noungolfThe golf club built to send the ball the furthest.~2%
“He took the driver out of the bag on the first tee.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 143 sentences found in the wild and placed 113 of them on a sense (30 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
driver is a person who operates a vehicle.
Also accepted in games: engineer
Middle English
drivere
English, today
driver
From Middle English drivere, from und + driven. From Middle English drivere, dryvere, dryvare, equivalent to drive + -er. Cognate with stq Drieuwer (“driver”), Dutch drijver (“driver”), German Low German Driever (“driver”), German Treiber (“driver”), Swedish drivare (“driver”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA