prescriptivist
Americannoun
adjective
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of prescriptivist
First recorded in 1950–55; prescriptive + -ist
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.
To behold a grammatical descriptivist at war with a grammatical prescriptivist who happens to be her twin is truly an uncommon pleasure.
From New York Times ● Feb. 6, 2020
Lionel Shriver, by contrast to McCulloch, is a prescriptivist.
From The New Yorker ● Aug. 15, 2019
Do you go out of your way to avoid splitting infinitives, make gargling noises in the “10 items or less” queue, and have strong feelings about the word “whom”? Take a jersey: you’re team prescriptivist.
From The Guardian ● Oct. 7, 2017
“There are people who think that the definition of a prescriptivist is a completely ill-informed armchair grammarian who just makes pronouncements on language without any knowledge of how words are actually used,” he says.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 8, 2016
But the book you are holding is avowedly prescriptivist: it consists of several hundred pages in which I am bossing you around.
From "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker
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.
