Artist

How to spell artist

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce artist

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does artist mean?

1. nounA person who creates art, especially paintings, drawings, or sculpture, or who performs creatively.

Artist in a sentence

• The gallery commissioned a local artist to paint the mural.

• As a recording artist, she released three albums in five years.

Where does artist come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word artist arrived in English in the late 1500s from the French artiste, which itself grew out of the Medieval Latin artista, a person skilled in the liberal arts. The base of all these forms is the Latin ars, with its stem art-, which literally meant 'skill' or 'craft', the kind of practical ability you develop through training rather than something inborn. For centuries an artist could be any learned or skilled practitioner, including scholars and craftsmen, before the meaning narrowed toward painters, sculptors, and other practitioners of the fine arts. The handy ending -ist, meaning 'one who does or practises', is the same piece you see in dentist, chemist, and cyclist. Because the word simply joins the familiar root art to that common suffix, its spelling is refreshingly transparent.

How the word is built

• art (from Latin ars, art-: skill, craft)
• -ist (one who practises)