Other forms: printers
A printer is the machine that puts what is on your screen onto paper. Send it to the printer, the printer jammed, a colour printer.
The machine is often cheap and the ink extraordinarily expensive by weight, which is the business model rather than an accident. The word also means a person or firm that prints books. A three-dimensional printer builds objects up in layers.
1nounprinterA machine that prints onto paper.
“The printer has run out of paper again.”
2nounfirmA person or firm that prints books.
“The author took her finished book to a local printer, who made two hundred copies.”
printer is a machine, or a trade.
Print plus -er, from Old French preinte, an impression, from Latin premere, to press.
Middle English
*printen
English
English, today
printer
Built from
From print + -er. From print + er. print comes from Middle English printen, prenten, preenten, an apheretic form of emprinten, enprinten (“to impress; imprint”) (see imprint). Compare Dutch prenten (“to imprint”), Middle Low German prenten (“to print; write”), Danish prente (“to print”), Swedish prenta (“to write German letters”). Compare also Late Old French printer, preindre (“to press”), from Latin premere (“to press”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA