from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- n. A literary person, a man of letters.
- n. One who writes professionally.
- n. A learned person.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
- n. One who teaches the letters or elements of knowledge; a petty schoolmaster.
- n. A person devoted to the study of literary trifles, esp. trifles belonging to the literature of a former age.
- n. A learned person; a literatus.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A petty schoolmaster; a dabbler in learning.
- n. A man of literary culture; a man of letters; a literary man.
- n. One who concerns himself with verbal and textual criticism.
Sorry, no etymologies found.
For he says that in old times, when a company of slaves was offered for sale by any person, it was not customary, without good reason, to describe either of them in the catalogue as a literati, but only as a literator, meaning that he was not a proficient in letters, but had a smattering of knowledge.
Some there are who draw a distinction between a literati and a literator, as the Greeks do between
"Goruki sounds like the name of a Russian literator," said Red Shirt.
"Yes, just like a Russian literator," Clown at once seconded Red Shirt.
Gorky for a Russian literator, Maruki a photographer of Shibaku, and komeno-naruki (rice) a life-giver, eh?
This president was the distinguished pianist and literator, Dr. Larry Nopkin, and his sarcastic glare at the pupils gave every man the nervous shivers.
The school of the _literatus_ was much better than that of the _literator_, but it reached only a limited number of the Roman youth.
Locke or Hume might perhaps still have resented a little the "literator judaeus," but Faraday or Clerk-Maxwell would have expressed the same opinion with only the change of a word: "If the twelfth century had once tasted true science, how quick they would have dropped Avicenna and Averroes!"
Thinking to make the descriptions yet more real, and therefore more impressive, I took the liberty of attributing the composition to a literator who, whatever may be thought of his works, was not himself a fiction.
But because he esteemed the Saviour only as one of many masters, and was a ` man of the letter '[margin note: literator] (which is better expressed in Greek, grammateus) not a spiritual hearer, therefore he had no place where Jesus might lay His head.