captain vs controller

captain

noun
  • A maître d', a headwaiter. 

  • An honorific title given to a prominent person. See colonel. 

  • The head boy of a school. 

  • A chief or leader. 

  • An army officer with a rank between the most senior grade of lieutenant and major. 

  • A naval officer with a rank between commander and commodore. 

  • The person lawfully in command of a ship or other vessel. 

  • One of the athletes on a sports team who is designated to make decisions, and is allowed to speak for his team with a referee or official. 

  • A commissioned officer in the United States Navy, Coast Guard, NOAA Corps, or PHS Corps of a grade superior to a commander and junior to a rear admiral (lower half). A captain is equal in grade or rank to a United States Army, Marine Corps, or Air Force colonel. 

  • The leader of a group of workers. 

verb
  • To act as captain 

  • To exercise command of a ship, aircraft or sports team. 

controller

noun
  • One who controls something. 

  • An iron block, usually bolted to a ship's deck, for controlling the running out of a chain cable. The links of the cable tend to drop into hollows in the block, and thus hold fast until disengaged. 

  • The chief accounting officer which audits, and manages the financial affairs of a company or government; a comptroller. 

  • The person who supervises and handles communication with an agent in the field. 

  • Any electric or mechanical device for controlling a circuit or system. 

  • In software applications using the model-view-controller design pattern, the part or parts of the application that treat input and output, forming an interface between models and views. 

  • A hardware device designed to allow the user to play video games. 

  • A mechanism that controls or regulates the operation of a machine, especially a peripheral device in a computer. 

  • The subject of a control verb. See Control (linguistics) 

How often have the words captain and controller occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )