People Who Work With Words

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Tori Cosrovi calling from Fort Worth.

Hi, Tori. Welcome.

How are you doing?

I have a question I hope you can answer. It is, what is the difference between a lexicographer, a linguist, and a wordsmith?

So, a lexicographer, a linguist, and a wordsmith walk into a bar and…

I was going to say…

Why are you thinking about this?

Well, my husband and I caught the tail end of an interview with, I think it was a lexicographer, and got talking about, well, I thought that was the linguist who did that. And we were, you know, going back and forth and figured, well, Martha and Grant will know. We’ll ask them.

Well, is there a lexicographer in the house?

Yes, as a matter of fact.

Hello, over here.

There is, right there. I am a practicing lexicographer. It’s not a religion. It’s not a pastime. It’s a profession. And what it means is that I compile and edit dictionaries. And that is the basic definition of a lexicographer. Or thesauruses. But that’s the basic definition of a lexicographer.

And a linguist, on the other hand, is somebody who almost always has some schooling. If they want to get work as a professional linguist of any stripe, they have professional schooling. And probably a doctorate or even more schooling than that, if possible. They study and analyze language or languages and all aspects of it. The body of linguists in North America probably numbers on the order of 10,000 or more. I think the Linguistic Society of America itself has more than 2,000 members. And so there are a ton of these.

Now, you probably know the non-academic meaning of linguist as somebody who speaks a lot of languages, right? Linguists actually are more interested in people misspeaking and just discovering why people make errors than they are in actually hearing people speak well.

Right. They’re into the mechanics rather than prescribing that one should do this or that.

And so the third thing that you asked about, Tori, the third person, was that a wordsmith?

Yeah.

Yeah, a wordsmith is somebody who is simply good at writing or editing writing, editing the printed word. Anyone can be one, and there are probably, what, a million of these in the United States? A lot of people are really great with language, and I would call all of them wordsmith. Wordsmith, however, is something that’s best applied to you rather than you applying the term to yourself.

Tori, so I hope we’ve helped you kind of work out the distinctions on lexicographer, linguist, and wordsmith.

You have. Thank you so much.

Thanks for calling.

All right. Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.