/klas"euh fuy'euhr/ , n.
1. a person or thing that classifies.
2. a device for separating solids of different characteristics by controlled rates of settling.
3. Gram. (in Chinese, Japanese, and other languages) a word or morpheme that corresponds to a semantic class of nouns and regularly accompanies any noun of that class in certain syntactic constructions, such as those of numeration.
[ 1810-20; CLASSIFY + -ER 1 ]