logodaedalus

English

Noun

logodaedalus (plural logodaedaluses)

1. A wordsmith; one who uses language with cleverness and skill.
   • 1924, Frank Crane, Edward Jewitt Wheeler, Current Opinion, volume 76:

     Mr. Auslander is a logodaedalus — a wizard of words — whose adjectives possess an unerring salience, whose vigor is as undinted as he bronze of a Thracian shield.

   • 1971, Edward Dahlberg, The Confessions of Edward Dahlberg, page 206:

     What had the ruffian café logodaedalus taught me?

   • 1981, Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, Encounter, volume 56, page 54:

     There are digressions on literature and the cinema and the tarot pack and crap-shooting and — above all, since Anthony Burgess has ever been a logodaedalus — language.

   • 2015, Peter E. Meltzer, The Thinker's Thesaurus:

     For example, Iain Gale of the Independent wrote of “the logodaedalus's universal sentence, 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,", which uses all the letters of the alphabet.

   • 2018, Alexander Marr, Raphaele Garrod, Jose Ramon Marcaida, Logodaedalus: Word Histories of Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe:

     Yet this enterprise was a slippery one; fictitious etymologies and overclever wordplay were the province of the logodaedalus: a dangerously cunning wordsmith..