initiator
/ɪˈnɪʃɪeɪtə
/noun
1A person or thing that initiates someone or something.As initiators of culture and producers of the societies in which we live, the destiny of modern man is our conscious choice....
- Sudden role reversals make it possible for the initiator to rationalise contradictions.
- After creating some initial noise its initiator immediately moved to disband it.
1.1 Chemistry A substance which starts a chain reaction.On another front, progress has recently been made in rendering polycondensation itself a controlled, living process by the judicious choice of monomer and well-defined molecular initiators....
- Macrodiols with different thermal characteristics were prepared using ring-opening polymerization of cyclic diesters or lactones with a low molecular weight diol as an initiator.
- For the synthetic studies, we made the peptides by polymerising an activated form of the amino acid (the N carboxyanhydride) using a nucleophile as an initiator.
1.2An explosive or device used to detonate a larger one.They're using cell phones as initiators to set off explosive devices when we get down on them.