whisperer

English

Etymology

From whisper +‎ -er. The extended senses were popularized by the film The Horse Whisperer (1998).

Noun

whisperer (plural whisperers)

1. Someone who whispers.
2. Someone who tells secrets; a gossip.
3. Someone who is skilled in taming or training a certain kind of animal, using gentle vocal commands and body language as opposed to physical contact. See horse whisperer.
4. (figurative, by extension) Someone who has an uncanny ability to control or manipulate a certain thing or person; an expert or guru in a particular field or subject

   dog whisperer

   hormone whisperer

   • 2015, Aaron Sorkin, Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, spoken by John Sculley (Jeff Daniels):

     'Cause I hear you've been worse than usual this morning and I didn't think that was possible. So I've been dispatched to be the Steve whisperer.

   • 2020, Emily Segal, Mercury Retrograde, New York: Deluge Books, →ISBN:

     Among my coworkers, I'd been developing a reputation as a boss-whisperer, in part due to the success of my unusual negotiation strategy, and as of that week, the unexpected success of the billboard.

   • 2023 September 30, Hannah Murphy, “The wildest job in Silicon Valley”, in FT Weekend, Life & Arts, page 18:

     These include Steve Davies, The Boring Company CEO, and Omead Afshar, who once led Tesla's Gigafactory in Austin and is nicknamed “the Elon whisperer”.

Derived terms

• AI whisperer
• dragon whisperer
• horse whisperer

Translations

someone who whispers

• French: chuchoteur (fr) m, chuchoteuse (fr) f
• Hungarian: (chiefly present participles only, not lexicalized as nouns) súgó (hu), suttogó (hu), sugdolózó, pusmogó, duruzsoló, susogó (hu)
• Irish: cogarnach m
• Norman: chuchoteux m, chuchoteuse f
• Old English: rūnere m
• Portuguese: murmurador
• Scottish Gaelic: neach-cagarsaich m

Further reading

• “whisperer n.”, in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Jonathon Green, 2016–present

Anagrams

• rewhisper