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writer

nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈɹaɪ.tə(ɹ)//
  • United Kingdom/[ˈɹ̠aɪtə(ɹ̠)]/
  • United States//ˈɹaɪ.təɹ//
  • United States/[ˈɹ̠aɪɾɚ]/

A person who writes, or produces literary work; an author can refer to themselves as "the writer".

noun

  1. 1

    A person who writes, or produces literary work; an author can refer to themselves as "the writer".

    Has your girlfriend written you another letter already? She’s quite a writer!

    I met some of my favourite authors at the writers' convention.

    the present writer (referring to oneself as the writer)

    Beautie alone is a ſoveraigne remedy againſt feare,griefe,and all melancholy fits; a charm,as Peter de la Seine and many other writers affirme,a banquet it ſelfe;he gives inſtance in diſcontented Menelaus that was ſo often freed by Helenas faire face: and ʰTully, 3 Tusc. cites Epicurus as a chiefe patron of this Tenent.

  2. 2

    Anything that writes or produces output.

    If the writer is set to autoflush mode, then all characters in the buffer are sent to their destination whenever println is called.

  3. 3

    A machine or tool used for writing, often by chording keys on a specialized keyboard (e.g. braillewriter, microwriter, stenograph).

  4. 4

    The seller of an option.

  5. 5

    historicalA clerk of a certain rank in the service of the East India Company, who, after serving a certain number of years, became a factor.

  6. 6

    An ordinary legal practitioner in Scottish country towns.

  7. 7

    A petty officer in the United States navy who keeps the watch-muster and other books of the ship.

  8. 8

    slangA graffiti artist.

    Writers were reunited with their crews, none having seen each other since back in the day, since they'd spun from teenage affiliations into lives more burdened and serious.

    Two aspects of style co-exist in graffiti art, as explained in chapter 2. There is a writer's personal style, and there is iconic style, or style as convention.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *wreyd-der.? Proto-Germanic *wrītaną Proto-West Germanic *wrītan Old English wrītan Proto-Indo-European *-yósder. Proto-Italic *-āzios Latin -āriusnom. Latin -āriusbor. Proto-Germanic *-ārijaz Proto-West Germanic *-ārī Old English -ere Old English wrītere Middle English writer English writer From Middle English writer, writere, from Old English wrītere (“draughtsman; painter; writer; scribe; copyist”) and ġewritere (“writer; composer”), equivalent to write + -er and writ + -er. Cognate with Icelandic ritari (“clerk, secretary”), Faroese ritari (“clerk, secretary”).

Forms

plural
writers
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).