Artisan

How to spell artisan

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce artisan

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does artisan mean?

1. nounA skilled worker who makes things by hand, especially in a traditional craft.

Artisan in a sentence

• The local artisan shaped each clay pot on a foot-powered wheel.

• Every loaf at the bakery is baked by a single artisan each morning.

Where does artisan come from?

Language of origin: French

This word entered English in the sixteenth century from French artisan, which French had in turn borrowed from the Italian artigiano. The deeper root is the Latin noun ars, with its stem artem, meaning 'skill', 'craft', or 'practical knowledge', the same root that gives us the everyday word 'art'. The Italian and French forms carried the sense of a person trained in a manual craft, a skilled worker who makes things by hand rather than by machine. Over time the English meaning settled on a craftsperson who produces goods with practised skill, and in modern marketing it has stretched to flatter anything made in small batches by hand, as in 'artisan bread'. A useful spelling reminder is that the word hides 'art' at its start, and the ending is the agent suffix -an, the same one seen in 'partisan', not -en or -on.

How the word is built

• artis- (from Latin ars, artis: art, skill)
• -an (suffix forming a noun denoting a person)