lexicographer: M-W's Word of the Day

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Happy Birthday Noah Webster! At a youthful 247, you're
still the Web Master! Read all about him here:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/noah.htm
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The Word of the Day for October 16 is:

lexicographer \lek-suh-KAH-gruh-fer\ noun
: an author or editor of a dictionary

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

Did you know?
Happy Dictionary Day! We're celebrating with a look 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 "lexicographer." "Lexikon," which itself descends from the Greek "lexis" (meaning "word" or "speech"), also gave us "lexicon," which can mean either "dictionary" or "the vocabulary of a language, speaker, or subject."

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