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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Academy Awards, List 3
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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:
“Not only am I not finding barf bags in the seat pocket, I’m also finding trash from prior passengers,” the 31-year-old motion designer from Atlanta said.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 16, 2026
The singer-songwriter bought the former home of fashion designer Laura Ashley in 2021, with its renovation later featuring in a Discovery Channel documentary series.
From BBC ● Oct. 15, 2026
Released in 1998 on the Nintendo 64, Ocarina of Time was the fifth entry in the franchise created by Shigeru Miyamoto, the legendary designer behind Mario.
From Barron's ● Oct. 15, 2026
“Costume designers have long been overlooked for the importance of their work in creating and influencing mainstream contemporary fashion,” fellow fashion designer Tom Ford told The Times in a 2019 email.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 14, 2026
Jetta, who planned on moving back to France someday to become a fashion designer, made everyone scarves.
From "Made You Up" by Francesca Zappia
“Costume designers have long been overlooked for the importance of their work in creating and influencing mainstream contemporary fashion,” fellow fashion designer Tom Ford told The Times in a 2019 email.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 14, 2026
That premise was handed to the designers at Uncommon Creative Studio, an agency with the likes of SiriusXM and Guinness on its client list, to turn into a visual identity.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 14, 2026
Spacecraft designers face strict limits on the weight and size of the equipment they can launch.
From Science Daily ● Oct. 9, 2026
"Somewhere along the way...this idea that the best designers were trying to always make new experiences...just sort of got dropped by the wayside," he says.
From BBC ● Oct. 6, 2026
The open source movement has grown to more than eight million users, perhaps the geekiest social movement on the Net, since its members and passionate adherents are programmers and designers.
From "Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho" by Jon Katz
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Get a wordDefinitions 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.
