Topic summary
Convenor
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Chair (officer).
Terminology
Terms for the office and its holder include chair, chairman, chairwoman, chairperson, convenor, facilitator, moderator, president, and presiding officer. The chair of a parliamentary chamber is sometimes called the speaker. Chair has been used to refer to a seat or office of authority since the middle of the 17th century; its earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary dates to 1658–1659, four years after the first citation for chairman. Feminist critiques have analysed Chairman as a possible example of sexist language, associating the male gender with the exercise of authority; this has led to some use of the generic "Chairperson".