kindergartner

• kindergartener (less common)

kindergarten +‎ -er, with spelling influenced by German Kindergärtner (“kindergarten teacher”).

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈkɪndɚˌɡɑrtnɚ/
• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈkɪndəˌɡɑːtnə/
• Hyphenation: kin‧der‧gart‧ner

kindergartner (plural kindergartners)

1. A child who attends a kindergarten.
   • 1993, Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower, HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP (2019), page 90:

     I partnered the older kids with my kindergartners and let everyone get a taste of teaching or learning from someone different.

2. (rare) A person who teaches at a kindergarten.
   • 1887, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Education in the Home, the Kindergarten, and the Primary School:

     But the heart is generally larger than the creed, as was once strikingly evidenced to me by Louisa Frankenberg, a dear, devout old German kindergartner, who had learned the art of kindergartning [...]

   • 1898, Thomas Davidson, “Rousseau’s Educational Theories”, in Rousseau and Education According to Nature (Nicholas Murray Butler, editor, The Great Educators), New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, section “Infancy”, page 107:

     [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau rightly insists that man’s education begins at his birth, and that what is acquired unconsciously far exceeds, in amount and importance, what is acquired consciously and through instruction.¹ […] ¹ This is a truth to which kindergærtners ought to give serious heed.

   • 1997, Barbara Beatty, Preschool Education in America: The Culture of Young Children:

     The book that laid the groundwork for this new ideology was written by a German kindergartner who had emigrated to America in the late 1860s.

   • 1999, Richard J. Altenbaugh, Historical Dictionary of American Education, page 48:

     She went to New York City in 1872 to train under German kindergartner Maria Kraus-Boelte[.]