Word of the Day

: May 28, 2011

lexicographer

noun lek-suh-KAH-gruh-fer

What It Means

: an author or editor of a dictionary

lexicographer in Context

The great lexicographer Noah Webster, who wrote the first authoritative dictionary of American English, was born on October 16, 1758.

"The 18th-century lexicographer and wit-about-town Samuel Johnson claimed that patriotism is the last resort of the scoundrel." -- From an article by Peter Foster in the Financial Post, April 28, 2011

Did You Know?

Today, we're looking at a word that is dear to our hearts: "lexicographer." The ancient Greeks were some of the earliest makers of dictionaries; they used them mainly to catalog obsolete terms from their rich literary past. To create a word for writers of dictionaries, the Greeks sensibly attached the suffix "-graphos," meaning "writer," to "lexikon," meaning "dictionary," to form "lexikographos," the direct ancestor of the English word "lexicographer." "Lexikon," which itself descends from Greek "lexis" (meaning "word" or "speech"), also gave us "lexicon," which can mean either "dictionary" or "the vocabulary of a language, speaker, or subject."