commander vs controller

commander

noun
  • One who exercises control and direction over a group of persons. 

  • One who exercises control and direction of a military or naval organization. 

  • A designation or rank in certain non-military organizations such as NASA and various police forces. 

  • A naval officer whose rank is above that of a lieutenant commander and below that of captain. 

  • A rank within an honorary order: e.g. Commander of the Legion of Honour. 

  • Any of various nymphalid butterflies of the Asian genus Moduza. 

  • A heavy beetle or wooden mallet, used in paving, in sail lofts, etc. 

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 commander and controller occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )