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''cruciverbalist'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260915190735-00-⌔

cruciverbalist - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

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Noun

cruciverbalist (plural cruciverbalists)

  • A person who constructs or solves crosswords.
    • ✤ Hypernym: puzzler

Etymology

Learned borrowing from Latin cruci- (a stem of crux (“cross”, noun); possibly from Proto-Indo-European ﹡krewk- (“back, spine; heap; hill (?)”) or ﹡(s)ker- (“to bend; to turn”)) + English verbalist (“one who possesses verbal or oratorical skill”), modelled after crossword1 (calqued in Latin as cruci- + verbum (“word”, noun)).

Pronunciation

  • (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /ˌkɹuːsɪˈvɜːbəlɪst/
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
  • (General American) IPA: /ˌkɹusəˈvɜɹbələst/
  • Audio (General American): 🔊
  • Rhymes: -ɜː(ɹ)bəlɪst
  • Hyphenation: cru‧ci‧verb‧al‧ist

Printed 2026-09-15.

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Footnotes

  1. “cruciverbalist, n.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, July 2023; “cruciverbalist, n.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022. ↩

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