Other forms: finders
A finder is whoever or whatever finds the thing that was lost. The finder of a dropped wallet who takes it to the desk; a metal detector working as a finder of small buried coins.
Finder is find plus -er, the ending that turns a verb into the doer, the same one in reader, driver and opener. You meet the word in two places. In fixed phrases: finders keepers, the playground rule that whoever finds a thing may keep it, and a finder's fee, the money paid to whoever brings a buyer and a seller together. And inside the names of devices: viewfinder, the small window you look through on a camera, plus rangefinder and pathfinder. On a Mac, Finder with a capital F is the program that shows you your files.
1nounfinderA person who finds something, especially something that was lost.
“The finder handed the phone in at the ticket office.”
2noundeviceA device or part of a device that locates something.
“He lined the shot up in the finder before pressing the shutter.”
finder is a person or device.
Finder is one of the oldest jobs English hands to a verb: take find, add -er, and you have the one who does it. Middle English wrote it findere, and the pattern has never stopped working — English still makes fresh -er words every year.
Middle English
findere
English, today
finder
From Middle English findere. by surface analysis, find + -er.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA