''transformer'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

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''transformer'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260331180822-00-⌔

transformer - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

transformer (plural transformers)

• Something that transforms, changing its own or another thing’s shape.
• (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.
  • ✤ 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.¹
• (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.
  • ✤ * Transformer is a deep machine learning model based on the encoder–decoder network architecture and is used primarily in the field of NLP.*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.)³
  • ✤ 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.⁴
• (fiction) Alternative letter-case form of Transformer.

Etymology

From transform + -er.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /tɹænsˈfɔːmə/, /tɹɑːns-/
• (General American) IPA: /tɹænsˈfoɹməɹ/
• Audio (General American): 🔊
• Rhymes: -ɔː(ɹ)mə(ɹ)
• Hyphenation: trans‧form‧er

Printed 2026-06-28.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

1. 2018 December 28, Michael Gold, “How an Explosion (Not Aliens) Turned New York’s Night Sky an Electric Blue”, in The New York Times ‎${}^{[1]}$: ↩

2. 2021, Lei Chen, Deep Learning and Practice with MindSpore, Springer Nature, →ISBN, page 116: ↩

3. 2023 January 31, Casey Newton, “Instagram’s co-founders are back with Artifact, a kind of TikTok for text”, in The Verge ‎${}^{[2]}$: ↩

4. 2025 May 24, Stephen Morris, Melissa Heikkilä, Cristina Criddle, “Defending the high ground”, in FT Weekend (Big Read section), London: The Financial Times Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 7: ↩

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