wordmaster

English

Etymology

From word +‎ master.

Noun

wordmaster (plural wordmasters)

1. One who is highly skilled as a speaker and/or writer.
   • 1957 May, George M[ichael] Leader, “Unions Must Be Secure”, in George Meany, editor, American Federationist, volume 64, number 5, Washington, D.C.: American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, page 9, column 2:

     My feelings are particularly strong about that piece of thinking the anti-union wordmasters have labeled “right to work” legislation.

   • 1963, Leonard Feather, Softly, The Brazilian Sound‎^[1], Warner Bros. Records Inc.:

     Old Guitaron is a characteristically attractive Laurindo Almeida melody, for which lyrics were provided by the high potentate of the wordmasters, Johnny Mercer.

   • 1974, The Visions of the Great Rememberer, Mulch Press, →ISBN, page 30:

     Perfect memories of Christmas 1948, and complex cross-country rendezvous of that season—& lovely prose echoes & homages to wordmasters Whitman & Melville, Yea Thoreau with “The Moon on the Pine Cone Glaze.”

   • 1977, Joseph Twadell Shipley, In Praise of English: The Growth & Use of Language, Times Books, →ISBN, page 101:

     Holding his ardor in check, he asked for her hand; she, still palindromically, amended: “Now, Ned, I am a maiden won.” Perhaps there is an admonition to office workers in the palindrome: “Sex at noon taxes.” There are many such sentences; wordmasters try to concoct the cleverest or the longest.

   • 1978, Business Education World, page 11:

     If language-arts needs are jeopardizing the job success of your alumni, then the spelling, punctuation, and English usage “drills and exercises” books get top billing. Office workers have to be wordmasters—it’s as simple as that.

   • 1983, Robert L. Steed, Lucid Intervals, Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, →ISBN, page 82:

     They appear to be written by the same people who produce the interminable repartee between radio disc jockeys and helicopter traffic observers with, I suspect, an energetic assist from those wordmasters who are responsible for the Shane Diamond Co. commercials.

   • 1985, Alice S. Maxwell, Marion B. Dunlevy, Virago!: The Story of Anne Newport Royall (1769–1854), Jefferson, N.C., London: McFarland & Company, Inc., →ISBN, page 49:

     The American experiment was in danger of becoming an exercise in semantics easily corrupted as to its meaning. Words had taken the place of deeds, and such wordmasters as Daniel Webster were now being promoted as the nation’s heroes.

   • 1989, Breyten Breytenbach, Memory of Snow and of Dust, New York, N.Y.: Farrar Straus Giroux, →ISBN, page 28:

     He must assume that his grey hair is giving him access to the age of respectability, and he hopes thus by association unobtrusively to identify with the great wordmasters.

   • 1992, Jonni Kincher, The First Honest Book About Lies, Free Spirit Publishing Inc., →ISBN, page 113:

     There are restrictions on how long the word “new” can be used to describe a product. But never fear, there are ways around this, too. Advertisers are clever wordmasters who seem to enjoy the challenge.

   • 1993, Judith H. Shulman, Amalia Mesa-Bains, editors, Diversity in the Classroom: A Casebook for Teachers and Teacher Educators, Research for Better Schools and Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, →ISBN, page 19:

     The youngsters become “wordmasters” as they engage in the verbal repartee of “playing the dozens,” “capping” or “toasting,” and the hard-hitting social commentary of rap.

   • 1993, Sally Dorothy Bailey, “Mainstreaming”, in Wings to Fly: Bringing Theatre Arts to Students with Special Needs, Woodbine House, →ISBN, page 335:

     An actor with a good sense of timing and verbal dexterity can do a lot with a character from a farce by wordmasters like Oscar Wilde or Tom Stoppard.

   • 1994, Catherine [Russell] Gira, Adele Seeff, “Introduction”, in Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2: An Annotated Bibliography (Garland Shakespeare Bibliographies; 26), New York, N.Y., London: Garland Publishing, Inc., →ISBN, page xiii:

     However his use of language is interpreted, Hal is recognized as an extraordinary wordsmith whose wit and verbal precocity put him on an almost equal footing with Falstaff and Hamlet, two of Shakespeare’s most gifted wordmasters.

   • 1995, Garrett Hardin, “Conspicuous Benevolence”, in Immigration and the American Identity: Selections From Chronicles, a Magazine of American Culture, 1985-1995, Rockford, Ill.: The Rockford Institute, →ISBN, section III (A Multicultural Society), page 164:

     Who is responsible for this mockery of democracy? I am ashamed to admit that it is the group to which I belong, the wordmasters—the people who manipulate words to move the minds of men and women.

   • 1997, Roger K. Newman, “Shelby E. Southard Lecture Series: School Prayer and the Ten Commandments in Alabama”, in Southern Academic Review: A Student Journal of Scholarship, volume 64, page 114, column 1:

     Words may be, as Socrates said, “more plastic than wax,” but they are the only thing we have to work with, and since the school prayer case wordmasters have been trying to come up with a subterfuge that would pass muster with the Supreme Court.

   • 2000, Melvin J[onah] Lasky, Profanity, Obscenity & the Media (The Language of Journalism; 2), New Brunswick, N.J., London: Transaction Publishers, published 2005, →ISBN, page 252:

     Can this be the deadend of the modern movement to capture “the very language of men” in everyday prose? Have we been betrayed, or misled, by our classic wordmasters who were such semantic idealists, such well-meaning rebels?

   • 2001, Jacey Lamerton, Everything You Need To Know: Public Speaking, HarperCollins Publishers, →ISBN, page 132:

     Television and radio presenters may be hugely experienced wordmasters, but even when they appear to be speaking spontaneously, they might still be reading from an autocue, or performing a well-rehearsed piece.

   • 2004, Marshall Fishwick, Probing Popular Culture On and Off the Internet, The Haworth Press, →ISBN, page 221:

     The urgency is for society to free itself from the shackles of these wordmasters, especially those in politics and the ever-expanding reaches of law and lawyers.

   • 2004, Doris Lessing, Time Bites: Views and Reviews, London, New York, N.Y.: Fourth Estate, →ISBN, page 111:

     Stalin did tend to go on about writers being the engineers of the human soul, but not one of his poets and wordmasters was interested in the kind of Soviet soul he hoped to forge in the fires of Revolution – forgive, but even the mention of Stalin brings on this kind of thing.

   • 2005 October, Play, page 070:

     Because Big Mutha Truckers wasn’t a delicious enough pun, the subtle wordmasters at Eutechnyx thought to add an even more savory subtitle for the sequel to their brick-driving simulation.

   • 2006, Janice Manning, editor, The Kolbrin Bible: 21st Century Master Edition, Your Own World, Inc., →ISBN:

     Give careful ear to the words of the wise and to the tales of the wordmasters, and always be a transmitter, not a transmuter, of traditions.

   • 2009, Nanci Kincaid, Eat, Drink, and Be from Mississippi, New York, N.Y., Boston, Mass., London: Little, Brown and Company, →ISBN, page 218:

     That night all three of them settled into their assigned beds, which was beginning to feel weird to Truely, the excessive togetherness of sleeping out in the open with people you should not be sleeping with, each of them wired to their book of choice more or less, forcing themselves to listen and see if they could learn anything from the classically renowned wordmasters.

2. One who knows a lot of words or a lot about words.
   • 1981, Starting Points in Reading: Level C/First Book, Teacher’s Guide, Ginn and Company, →ISBN, pages 68–69:

     As the students read the assembled articles on islands, have them note unfamiliar words and transcribe the sentences in which they appear. These are to be submitted to a pre-selected team of “wordmasters,” who will look up the words in the dictionary, select the appropriate meaning for each, then compose four sentences: two that provide different contexts for the word, one that uses a synonym, and one that uses an antonym.

   • 1986 October, Ted Salamone, “A Play on Words”, in MacUser, page 102:

     Entitled Perplexx, this Scrabble look and play alike also pits wordmasters against a computer foe named Lexx.

   • 1987, Hugh Cook, The Wordsmiths and the Warguild (Chronicles of an Age of Darkness; 2), Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, →ISBN, page 28:

     From inside the stronghold of the Wordsmiths there came sounds of confusion. There was some banging and crashing and shouting, then three wordmasters sprinted through the open gate, running for their lives.

   • 1990, Richard James Marshall, Home Teaching with Purpose and Power, Salt Lake City, Ut.: Deseret Book Company, →ISBN, page 117:

     “[…] What is a standing minister? The wordmasters on our committee checked their lexicons and have attempted to define the term as follows.”

   • 2000, Best of the Best Sites.com: Companion Guide to the Best of the Web, Abbiss, →ISBN, page 57:

     A vivid, multi-colored entertaining look at the world of words can be found on this Webby Award–winning site from the wordmasters at Merriam-Webster.