essayist
Americannoun
noun
Etymology
Origin of essayist
Explanation
Someone who writes short, literary nonfiction is an essayist. If you love penning political manifestos or book reviews, you might want to try being a published essayist. Anyone who writes short pieces of nonfiction can describe themselves as an essayist, especially if those essays get published in journals or on websites. All you need to do to become an essayist is polish your writing skills and find a topic you're really interested in — then start writing essays! Essayist is from essay and its Latin root exigere, "try out or test."
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
It pounced upon the coincidence that James Joyce, the Dada poet and essayist Tristan Tzara and Vladimir Lenin were all living in Zurich in 1917.
From The Wall Street Journal • Nov. 30, 2025
Critics, including a guest essayist for the New York Times, have called his Oval Office remodel a "Gilded Rococo Nightmare".
From BBC • Oct. 15, 2025
The author is a writing professor for Antioch University and a published essayist who lives in Los Angeles County.
From Los Angeles Times • Sep. 26, 2025
Aisha Sabatini Sloan is an essayist and the author of four books, including “Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit” and “Captioning the Archives,” which she co-authored with her father, photographer Lester Sloan.
From Los Angeles Times • May 8, 2025
Still, those writers would likely have been thinking of Indians without him—the essayist Montaigne had noted the same antiauthoritarian attitudes a century earlier.
From "1491" by Charles C. Mann
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
