maintainer

From Anglo-Norman maintenour, Old French mainteneor, from maintenir (“to maintain”); with later remodelling of the suffix after -er. By surface analysis, maintain +‎ -er.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /meɪnˈteɪnə/

• Rhymes: -eɪnə(ɹ)

maintainer (plural maintainers)

1. Someone who keeps or upholds something; a steward.

   He become the maintainer of the software project.

   • 1526, [William Tyndale, transl.], The Newe Testamẽt […] (Tyndale Bible), [Worms, Germany: Peter Schöffer], →OCLC, Matthew:

     Blessed are the maynteyners of peace: for they shalbe called the chyldren of God.

2. A person who does maintenance work.
   • 2016 May 26, Steve Almasy and Chris Boyette, “Lost hiker’s message: Please call husband when my body is found”, in CNN‎^[1]:

     “In somm trouble. Got off trail to go to br. Now lost. Can u call AMC to c if a trail maintainer can help me. Somewhere north of woods road. Xox,” she wrote.

   • 2021 October 14, Oren Liebermann, “CENTCOM disputes Air Force account of attempted hijacking at Kabul airport during Afghanistan evacuation”, in CNN‎^[2]:

     “To stay open, the senior enlisted leader of U.S. Forces-Afghanistan Forward said he needed people to cover security,” Duncan wrote. “Personnel Recovery Task Force (PRTF) Pilots, maintainers and support personnel donned their vests, helmets and M-4 rifles and manned defensive fighting positions.”

   • 2022 January 26, Philip Haigh, “The 'holes in the Swiss cheese' that led to train derailment”, in RAIL, number 949, page 46:

     RAIB looked at why the washers were missing. This took it into the relationship between the wagon's owner and maintainers.

   • 2025 January 30, Helen Regan, Taylor Romine, Dalia Faheid, et. al., “January 30, 2025 - DC plane collision news”, in CNN‎^[3]:

     Muehlendorf told CNN that O’Hara was a crew chief by trade, explaining that his “military occupational specialty was a 15T and he was originally trained to be a maintainer of Black Hawk helicopters.”

3. (dentistry) A device used to keep teeth in a given position.

• maintenance