Word of the Day

: December 18, 2023

raconteur

noun ra-kahn-TER

What It Means

A raconteur is someone who excels in telling anecdotes.

// A bona fide raconteur, Paola can turn even mundane experiences into hilariously entertaining stories.

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raconteur in Context

“He [filmmaker and author Kenneth Anger] lit and shot and cut images so that no matter how beautiful each was on its own, you had to ingest the totality like a potion and let it do its work if you wanted to get anything out of it. Most viewers weren’t interested in his kind of visual poetry, recognizing him mainly as a raconteur.” — Matt Zoller Seitz, Vulture, 27 May 2023

Did You Know?

If you’re a sage of sagas, a bard of ballads, or a pro in prose, you may have lost count of the accounts you’ve recounted. Some might call you a recounter, but as a master of narrative form you may find that recounter lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. Sure, it has a cool story—it traces back to the Latin verb computere, meaning “to count”—but so do many words: compute and computer, count and account, and neither last nor least, raconteur, a singsong title better fit for a whimsical storyteller. English speakers borrowed raconteur from French in the early 19th century.