designer
Americannoun
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designers
plural
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a person who devises or executes designs, especially one who creates forms, structures, and patterns, as for works of art or machines.
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a schemer, intriguer, or plotter.
adjective
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designed or created by or carrying a label or identification of a designer, especially a fashion designer, but often mass-produced.
designer jeans.
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created for intentional effect through chemical or genetic modification, as for a designer drug, or through crossbreeding, as for a designer dog.
noun
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a person who devises and executes designs, as for works of art, clothes, machines, etc
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(modifier) designed by and bearing the label or signature of a well-known fashion designer
designer jeans
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(modifier) (of things, ideas, etc) having an appearance of fashionable trendiness
designer pop songs
designer stubble
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(modifier) (of cells, chemicals, etc) designed (or produced) to perform a specific function or combat a specific problem
designer insecticide
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(modifier) (of an animal) cross-bred for a specific purpose, such as looks, temperament, or likelihood of causing an allergy
designer dogs
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a person who devises plots or schemes; intriguer
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of designer
Explanation
A designer is a person who plans how something will look. An architect is a designer of buildings, drawing detailed blueprints indicating what the structures should look like and how they should be built. The word designer came into English in the seventeenth century meaning "one who schemes." The word soon came to describe someone who figures out how something should look, especially something artistic. If you're reading a newspaper, a graphic designer planned how the text and images should look on each page. You might also be familiar with a fashion designer, someone who comes up with a vision for a garment and creates sketches to show what the finished product will look like.
Vocabulary lists containing designer
Occupations
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Engineering - Introductory
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Garden designer Ann-Marie Powell created test beds of long-lived plants happy in high temperatures, including Siskiyou Pink plants, native to the southern United States.
From Barron's ● Aug. 25, 2026
After college, she worked as a stunt actor, fight choreographer and action designer specializing in European weapons.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 24, 2026
Another couple, wearing designer sunglasses, told me that they had traveled here all the way from Italy to try Cane’s.
From Slate ● Aug. 24, 2026
Production designer Cat Smith said she had attended a similarly exclusive all-girls school nearby, Marlborough, giving her insight into the obscene wealth people had and what they did with it.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 19, 2026
He was the videogame designer responsible for creating the OASIS, a massively multiplayer online game that had gradually evolved into the globally networked virtual reality most of humanity now used on a daily basis.
From "Ready Player One: A Novel" by Ernest Cline
Created by master designers such as Lancelot "Capability" Brown and William Kent, the gardens of stately homes such as Hampton Court, Blenheim Palace, and Chatsworth House are among England's top visitor attractions.
From Barron's ● Aug. 25, 2026
Plumbers, chefs, contractors, pool guys and landscape designers are becoming Instagram- and TikTok-famous, a piece from Lane Florsheim for WSJ.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 24, 2026
Like many retailers, Matteo Sgaramella, founder of Toronto-based menswear brand Outclass, told the BBC that his company collects orders from clothing designers months before they are due to arrive in stores.
From BBC ● Aug. 24, 2026
But the Aerotrain designers did not see fit to extend the line to concourse D, in part because both C and D were built in the ’80s as temporary concourses meant to be replaced.
From Slate ● Aug. 18, 2026
Here, just below one of the guard towers in the yard’s corner, the prison designers had installed a basketball court.
From "100 Sideways Miles" by Andrew Smith
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
