kindergartner

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

From kindergarten +‎ -er, with spelling influenced by German Kindergärtner (“kindergarten teacher”).^[1]

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.

   • 2025 September 3, Deidre McPhillips, Shawn Nottingham, “Florida plans to end vaccine mandates statewide, including for schoolchildren”, in CNN‎^[1]:

     All 50 states have had school immunization requirements since the beginning of the 1980s, with incoming kindergartners needing shots to protect against diseases including measles, polio and tetanus. No states require a Covid-19 vaccine for schoolchildren.

• kindergartener (less common)
• Kindergärtner, kindergärtner (nonstandard)

From German Kindergärtner.^[1]

kindergartner (plural kindergartners)

1. (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.

   • 1919, Harriet L. Shafter, letter, in J. H. Schults, editor, The Kindergarten-Primary Magazine, volume XXXII, Manistee, Mich.: The Kindergarten Magazine Company, page 92, column 1:

     I am a kindergartner, teaching in the Harrington School, New Bedford, Mass., and am a reader of the “Kindergarten Primary Magazine.”

   • 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[.]

• Kindergärtner, kindergärtner