developer

American  

[dih-vel-uh-per] / dɪˈvɛl ə pər /

noun

1. a person or thing that develops or innovates.

   a software developer.

2. Photography. a reducing agent or solution for developing a film or the like.

3. a person who invests in and develops the urban or suburban potentialities of real estate, especially by subdividing the land into home sites and then building houses and selling them.

4. Shipbuilding. a person who lays out at full size the lines of a vessel and prepares templates from them.

---

developer British  

/ dɪˈvɛləpə /

noun

1. a person or thing that develops something, esp a person who develops property

2. photog a solution of a chemical reducing agent that converts the latent image recorded in the emulsion of a film or paper into a visible image

---

Etymology

Origin of developer

First recorded in 1825–35; develop + -er ¹

Example Sentences

The company famously teetered on the edge of bankruptcy in 1996, surviving only through a $5 million cash injection from the Japanese videogame developer Sega.

From MarketWatch • May 23, 2026

Four years ago, billionaire developer Rick Caruso, a Democrat who was previously registered as a Republican, spent more than $100 million running against Bass and lost by nearly 10 percentage points.

From The Wall Street Journal • May 21, 2026

“That’s why I think there’s potential for him to unlock a constituency that wasn’t going to vote for a Rick Caruso,” he said, referring to the developer who lost to Bass in 2022.

From Los Angeles Times • May 21, 2026

French start-up Pasqal, another developer of neutral-atom quantum systems, is slated to go public later this year.

From Barron's • May 20, 2026

Here she wouldn't be Dimple Shah, wayward, Americanized daughter of immigrant parents; she’d be just Dimple Shah, future web developer.

From "When Dimple Met Rishi" by Sandhya Menon

Related Words

• builder
• planner