receptor

Receptor, receptoris, m., third declension: an agent noun off recipio, so literally "one who takes in". The neutral reading is a shelterer or a receiver, and it is occasionally used that way of a harbour or a host.

In practice the word is almost always hostile. In legal Latin the receptor is the man who takes in thieves, runaway slaves, exiles or stolen goods, and the charge attached to it was real; the feminine receptrix carries the same stain. English "receiver" in the criminal sense is the true descendant. The modern "receptor" of physiology and pharmacology is a nineteenth-century coinage that borrows the shape and none of the history, so do not read it back into a medieval text.