Meaning

• One who operates.

• A telecommunications facilitator whose job is to establish temporary network connections.

• A function or other mapping that carries variables defined on a domain into another variable or set of variables in a defined range.

• The game of Chinese whispers.

• A person who is adept at making deals or getting results, especially one who uses questionable methods.

• A member of a military special operations unit.

• The administrator of a channel or network on IRC.

• A symbol that represents a construct in a programming language and differs from a normal function in its syntax.

• A kind of expression that enters into an a-bar movement dependency and is said to bind a variable.

  "In the sentence "What did Bill say he wants to buy?", "what" is an operator, binding a phonetically empty variable."