Biographer

How to spell biographer

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce biographer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does biographer mean?

1. nounA person who writes an account of someone else's life.

Biographer in a sentence

• The biographer spent three years interviewing the actor's old friends.

• As the official biographer, she was granted access to the family letters.

Where does biographer come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is built from two Greek roots: bios, meaning 'life', and graphein, meaning 'to write' or 'to record'. The noun 'biography', a written account of someone's life, was formed from these elements and entered English in the seventeenth century, drawing on the Late Greek combination biographia. The agent noun 'biographer', meaning the person who writes such an account, followed soon after by adding the familiar English -er ending. The same bios root sits inside 'biology' and 'biosphere', while graphein gives us 'photograph', 'paragraph' and 'autograph', so the spelling rewards anyone who recognises those two reliable building blocks. The trap is purely the unstressed middle: the strong second-syllable stress swallows the vowels of '-ographer', tempting writers to drop or muddle the schwa-laden 'o', 'a' and 'e'.

How the word is built

• bio- (life)
• graph (write/record)
• -er (agent noun: one who does)