Definition of "accumulator"

accumulator

/ə.ˈkjum.jə.ˌleɪ.tɚ/

noun
plural accumulators
1. (literal) One who, or that which, accumulates.
2. (Britain) A wet-cell storage battery.
3. (gambling) A collective bet on successive events, with both stake and winnings being carried forward to accumulate progressively.
  Quotations
  The largest payout for a bet on a horse race was $1,627,084 after tax, paid to Britons Anthony Speelman and Nicholas Cowan on their $64 nine-horse accumulator at Santa Anita Racecourse, California, in 1987.
  2000, Guinness World Records, Guinness Book of Records 2000, Demco Media
4. (mechanics) A system of elastic springs for relieving the strain upon a rope, as in deep-sea dredging.
5. (manufacturing) A vessel containing pressurized hot water ready for release as steam.
6. (engineering, hydraulics) A container which stores hydraulic power for release, in the form of a pressurized fluid (often suspended within a larger tank of fluid under pressure).
7. (programming) A register or variable used for holding the intermediate results of a computation or data transfer.
  Quotations
  The contents of the memory location and accumulator are NOT altered, but the Negative, Zero and Carry flags are conditioned according to the result of the subtraction.
  1986, Jules H. Gilder, Apple IIc and IIe Assembly Language, Springer Science & Business Media, page 139
  The function signature has changed to include the additional parameter accumulator. This parameter, in a way, takes on the job of the return value.
  2011, Oliver Sturm, Functional Programming in C#, John Wiley & Sons, page 122
8. (finance) A derivative contract under which the seller commits to sell shares of an underlying security at a certain strike price, which the buyer is obligated to buy.
  Quotations
  This product was fairly popular among investors in Hong Kong in 2007 considering the market conditions at that time. It is an accumulator of the underlying stock with a contract period of 12 months.
  2014, Jerome Yen, Kin Keung Lai, Emerging Financial Derivatives, Routledge
9. (UK, education, historical) One who takes two higher degrees simultaneously, to reduce their length of study.
  Quotations
  The first of these two was a compounder, the other who was an accumulator, was lately made provost of Trin. coll. near Dublin, and on the 31st of March 1692 was nominated bish. of Kilmore.
  1691–92, Anthony Wood (antiquary), Athenæ Oxonienses
10. (cryptography) A one way membership function.