Definition of "distributer"

However, as he kept the post-office, it was imagined he had better opportunities of obtaining news; his paper was thought a better distributer of advertisements than mine, and therefore had many, more, which was a profitable thing to him, and a disadvantage to me; for, tho' I did indeed receive and send papers by the post, yet the publick opinion was otherwise, for what I did send was by bribing the riders, who took them privately, Bradford being unkind enough to forbid it, which occasion'd some resentment on my part; and I thought so meanly of him for it, that, when I afterward came into his situation, I took care never to imitate it.

c. 1788, Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin‎

Nothing remains, but that, with humble confidence we resign ourselves to almighty goodness, and fall down, without irreverent murmurs, before the sovereign distributer of good and evil, with hope, that though sorrow endureth for a night, yet joy may come in the morning.

1825, Samuel Johnson, Dr. Johnson's Works= Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1‎

The first of these maintains that Fichte's standpoint and that of his opponents are related as duty and advantage, sensible and suprasensible, and that the substantial God of his accusers, to be derived from the sensibility, is, as personified fate, as the distributer of all happiness and unhappiness to finite beings, a miserable fetich.

1893, Richard Falckenberg, History Of Modern Philosophy‎

The irrigating ditch is an impartial distributer.

1903, Mary Hunter Austin, The Land Of Little Rain‎

[I]n 2001 a federal judge forced Napster to close its doors (it has since relaunched under different ownership as a legitimate distributer of copyrighted music).

2005 March 28, David McGuire, “At a Glance: MGM v. Grokster”, in Washington Post, retrieved 1 February 2017