means A person who controls and animates puppets, giving them movement and voice during a performance.

from Built from "puppet" plus the agent suffix "-eer" (one who does a thing, as in engineer or auctioneer). "Puppet" came into English from Middle French "poupée," meaning doll, and traces back to Latin "puppa" (or "pupa"), a word for a little girl or a doll. That same Latin "pupa" gives us the biological pupa—the doll-like, swaddled stage of an insect—so a puppeteer and a butterfly share a surprisingly tidy linguistic ancestor.