Word of the Day
: December 18, 2023raconteur
playWhat 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.
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.
Test Your Vocabulary with M-W Quizzes
Test Your Vocabulary
Fill in the blanks to create the name for a historian and storyteller of western Africa: g _ _ ot.
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