monitor — English Dictionary

Noun

1. Someone who watches over something; a person in charge of something or someone.

   Examples

   The camp monitors look after the children during the night, when the teachers are asleep.

   And oft, mild friend, to me thou art A monitor, though still; Thou speak'st a lesson to my heart, Beyond the preacher's skill.

2. A device that detects and informs on the presence, quantity, etc., of something.

3. A device similar to a television set used as to give a graphical display of the output from a computer.

   Examples

   The information flashed up on the monitor.

4. A studio monitor or loudspeaker.

5. A program for viewing and editing.

   Examples

   a machine code monitor

6. The command line interface of an operating system.

   Usage

   • Dated

7. A student leader in a class.

   Usage

   • Hong-Kong
   • Singapore
   • Archaic
   • in UK

   Examples

   More examples (1)

   So, as she did not like the masters to be prying about the play-ground out of school, she chose from among the biggest and most trustworthy of her pupils five monitors, who had authority over the rest of the Boys, and kept the unruly ones in order.

   But it was not so—at least, not always—for though they fell out among themselves, they united their forces against the common enemy—the monitors!

   He learned that a monitor should assist the teachers in distributing worksheets, maintaining class discipline, helping classmates in need and so on.

8. A relatively small armored warship with only one or two turrets (but often carrying unusually large guns for a warship of its size), usually designed for shore bombardment or riverine warfare rather than open-ocean combat.

9. A monitor lizard (Varanus spp. and extinct relatives in family Varanidae).

10. A tool holder, as for a lathe, shaped like a low turret, and capable of being revolved on a vertical pivot so as to bring several tools successively into position.

11. A monitor nozzle.

12. One who admonishes; one who warns of faults, informs of duty, or gives advice and instruction by way of reproof or caution.

    Usage

    • Obsolete

    Examples

    c. 1620, Francis Bacon, letter of advice to Sir George Villiers You need not be a monitor to your gracious master the king.

    There has been no lack of other monitors — a ticklish haysel, a flooded harvest all through the north […]

13. An ironclad warship with a low freeboard and a rotating turret.

    Usage

    • Archaic

14. A modern shallow-draft warship for coastal bombardment.

Verb

1. To watch over; to guard.

   Usage

   • Transitive

   Synonyms

   overseesupervisetrack

   Examples

   Monitoring refers to keeping a watch over patients to ensure that they are practising what they have learnt about disability prevention correctly.

   During July 1989-February 1990 ambient SO₂, was monitored using a mobile station in the residential-commercial neighborhood of Copacabana.

   More examples (2)

   2002, Mark Baker, Garry Smith, GridRM: A Resource Monitoring Architecture for the Grid, in Manish Parashar (editor), Grid Computing - GRID 2002: Third International Workshop, Springer, LNCS 2536, page 268, A wide-area distributed system such as a Grid requires that a broad range of data be monitored and collected for a variety of tasks such as fault detection and performance monitoring, analysis, prediction and tuning.

   The NOAA monitors global temperatures and records on a monthly and an annual basis, not daily. […] Various parts of the world have been experiencing heatwaves and on Thursday the EU’s climate monitoring service said the world had experienced its hottest June on record last month.

Noun

1. someone who supervises (an examination)

   Synonyms

   proctor

   Broader terms

   supervisor

2. someone who gives a warning so that a mistake can be avoided

   Synonyms

   admonisherreminder

   Broader terms

   defenderguardianprotectorshielder

3. display produced by a device that takes signals and displays them on a television screen or a computer monitor

   Synonyms

   monitoring device

   Broader terms

   displayvideo display

4. electronic equipment that is used to check the quality or content of electronic transmissions

   Broader terms

   electronic equipment

5. a piece of electronic equipment that keeps track of the operation of a system continuously and warns of trouble

   Broader terms

   electronic equipment

6. any of various large tropical carnivorous lizards of Africa and Asia and Australia; fabled to warn of crocodiles

   Synonyms

   monitor lizardvaran

   Broader terms

   lizard

Verb

1. keep tabs on; keep an eye on; keep under surveillance

   Synonyms

   supervise

   Broader terms

   observe

   Examples

   we are monitoring the air quality

   the police monitor the suspect's moves

2. check, track, or observe by means of a receiver

   Broader terms

   observe