editor

American  

[ed-i-ter] / ˈɛd ɪ tər /

noun

• editors
  plural

1. a person having managerial and sometimes policy-making responsibility related to the writing, compilation, and revision of content for a publishing firm or for a newspaper, magazine, or other publication.

   She was offered a managing editor position at a small press.

2. the supervisor or manager of a department of a newspaper, magazine, etc..

   the sports editor of a newspaper.

3. a person who edits, or selects and revises, material for publications, films, etc..

   a video editor;

   the editor of an online journal.

4. a device for viewing, cutting, and editing film or magnetic tape to make movies, audio recordings, etc.

5. Computers. a program used for writing and revising code, data, or text.

   an XML editor.

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editor British  

/ ˈɛdɪtə /

noun

1. a person who edits written material for publication

2. a person in overall charge of the editing and often the policy of a newspaper or periodical

3. a person in charge of one section of a newspaper or periodical

   the sports editor

4. films

   1. a person who makes a selection and arrangement of individual shots in order to construct the flowing sequence of images for a film

   2. a device for editing film, including a viewer and a splicer

5. television radio a person in overall control of a programme that consists of various items, such as a news or magazine style programme

6. a computer program that facilitates the deletion or insertion of data within information already stored in a computer

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Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• editorship
  noun

Inflected Forms

Nouns

• editors
  plural

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Etymology

Origin of editor

1640–50; < Medieval Latin, Late Latin: publisher; see edit, -tor

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Explanation

Newspaper editors don't write the stories, but they come up with the story ideas, assign them to writers, read all of the drafts, and correct and change them to make them ready to be published. You can be an editor without working at a newspaper. Magazines and books are all worked on by editors. There are photo editors and film editors, who splice together the footage and determine a movie's pacing. Even if you just correct your friend's spelling mistakes, you're editing her work.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

editor editors

“To put it more precisely: a Zacharia is about .4 of a Scaramucci,” Anna Bower, a senior editor at Lawfare, posted on Blue Sky.

From Salon ● Oct. 16, 2026

Both of them have latterly turned to personal projects, working with their wives -- film editor Tricia Cooke and actress Frances McDormand -- on movies such as "Honey Don't" and "The Tragedy of Macbeth".

From Barron's ● Oct. 16, 2026

Times audience editor Kate Sequeira contributed to this report.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 15, 2026

That’s according to newsletter editor Steven Jon Kaplan, who is alarmed by what he sees as investors piling into stocks without much thought.

From MarketWatch ● Oct. 15, 2026

One editor described Kate as “twelve years of age and evidently has no more conception of the rapping than a canary bird.”

From "American Spirits" by Barb Rosenstock

At Sorkin’s version of the Wall Street Journal, everyone up and down the masthead — editors, writers, even interns — insults each other with such relish that someone should be written up by HR.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 9, 2026

Industry editors, sound mixers, visual effects artists and composers had said such a credit was necessary to lure jobs back from overseas.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 7, 2026

"My own editors wouldn't let me publish a scoop based on a single anonymous source, and here you are telling me I'm a spy," he recalls in his book.

From Barron's ● Sep. 30, 2026

When the website's editors noticed and started deleting pages, the agents shared code designed to retrieve them.

From BBC ● Sep. 24, 2026

Union leaders called my home and warned me against any contact with my former editors, many of whom were my friends, telling me to hang up if they tried to call and plead their case.

From "Tuesdays with Morrie" by Mitch Albom

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