What is the physical significance of the del operator?

Most of this material has been modified from the electromagnetism text by Griffiths.

This chapter may seem a little strange. Till now, you've mostly dealt with scalars, vectors and functions. Operators are similar to functions, but they exhibit important differences. The best way to learn about them is through an example that should already be familiar to you-the gradient.

The physical significance is: del or nabla ∇ is a vector operator. Remember that Del gives you the measure of gradient, divergence, curl an so on of the fields. I hope this is good enough for you