Reckoners

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Individuals or devices that determine numerical values or consequences from various data inputs
2. Entities responsible for analyzing and computing potential outcomes based on available information
3. Persons or instruments that figure out numbers or results by processing data

Etymology: "Reckoners" is the plural of "reckoner", a form built from "reckon" plus the agent suffix "-er", meaning one who reckons, counts, or calculates. The word has been in English since Middle English, when it appeared as "reknere" or "rekenere", and its relatives remain alive across the Germanic family: German "Rechner" (calculator or computer), Swedish "räknare", Danish "regner", and Afrikaans "rekenaar", which is the everyday word for computer. The sense of the word has moved from ordinary counting toward the calculation of outcomes. Its ancestors described people who did sums, such as accountants or tally-keepers, and the modern meaning, those who analyse information to estimate what is likely to happen, grows naturally from that older idea of working out a result from given numbers. The same root gives German and Afrikaans a term for the machine that now does the reckoning.

Synonyms: calculators, estimators, evaluators