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."
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Starting at the micro level, and with the PISTOL emoji in particular, Jane Solomon, senior emoji lexicographer at Emojipedia, has demonstrated that 🔫 more often points toward other emoji (and often toward a face emoji at that), rather than away from them.—Longreads, 1 July 2025 After graduating, Wallace-Hadrill worked as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary.—Maureen MacKey, FOXNews.com, 30 Mar. 2025 Esme was the motherless daughter of one of the lexicographers, and spent her youth sitting under the table in the Scriptorium while words were sorted and accepted or discarded.—The Know, The Denver Post, 2 Mar. 2025 But popularity isn’t the only factor lexicographers consider when determining the word of the year.—Sarah Kuta, Smithsonian Magazine, 25 Nov. 2024 See All Example Sentences for lexicographer
Word History
Etymology
Late Greek lexikographos, from lexikon + Greek -graphos writer, from graphein to write
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