transformer

• tformer, t-former (shortening)
• transformator (archaic)

From transform +‎ -er.

• (General American) IPA^(key): /tɹænsˈfɔɹmɚ/
• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /tɹænsˈfɔːmə/, /tɹɑːnsˈfɔːmə/

• Audio (US):

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• Hyphenation: trans‧form‧er

transformer (plural transformers)

1. Something that transforms, changing its own or another thing's shape.
3. (electrical engineering) A static device that transfers electric energy from one circuit to another by magnetic coupling; primarily used to transfer energy between different voltage levels, which allows the most appropriate voltages for power generation, transmission and distribution to be chosen separately.
   • 2018 December 28, Michael Gold, “How an Explosion (Not Aliens) Turned New York’s Night Sky an Electric Blue”, in The New York Times‎^[1]:

     While initial reports Thursday traced the glow to a transformer explosion or a fire, Mr. McGee said there was no fire, and there were no transformers involved.

4. (machine learning) A neural network architecture composed of layers of attention which takes sequences of tokens (representing text, images, audio, or other modalities) as input.
   • 2021, Lei Chen, Deep Learning and Practice with MindSpore, Springer Nature, →ISBN, page 116:

     Transformer is a deep machine learning model based on the encoder–decoder network architecture and is used primarily in the field of NLP.

   • 2023 January 31, Casey Newton, “Instagram’s co-founders are back with Artifact, a kind of TikTok for text”, in The Verge‎^[2]:

     The transformer helped machine-learning systems improve at a much faster pace, leading directly to last year’s release of ChatGPT and the attendant boom in interest around AI. (Transformers are the “T” in ChatGPT.)

   • 2025 May 24, Stephen Morris, Melissa Heikkilä, Cristina Criddle, “Defending the high ground”, in FT Weekend, Big Read, page 7:

     Privately, many at Google have bristled at criticism of its AI credentials, in particular given that it incubated the underlying technology and released it publicly in the 2017 transformers paper.

5. (fiction) Alternative letter-case form of Transformer.

• transform
• transformation

• metamorphosis
• shape change

• retransform

• IPA^(key): [tʁ̥ɑnsˈfɒːmɐ]

transformer c (singular definite transformeren, plural indefinite transformere)

1. (electrical engineering) transformer

• transformator

• IPA^(key): [tʁ̥ɑnsfɒˈmeɐ̯ˀ]

transformer

1. imperative of transformere

Inherited from Old French transformer, borrowed from Latin trānsfōrmāre.

• IPA^(key): /tʁɑ̃s.fɔʁ.me/

• Audio:

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transformer

1. to transform

• transformation

• “transformer”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.

trānsfōrmer

1. first-person singular present passive subjunctive of trānsfōrmō

transformer

1. indefinite plural of transform