Painter
nounA person who paints, either as an artist or as someone who applies paint to walls and surfaces.
How to spell painter
7 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce painter
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does painter mean?
- nounA person who paints, either as an artist or as someone who applies paint to walls and surfaces.
Painter in a sentence
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The painter spent the morning rolling fresh white onto the hallway walls.
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As a landscape painter, she sold her canvases at the weekend market.
Where does painter come from?
Language of origin: Latin
The everyday sense traces back to the Latin verb pingere, meaning 'to paint, depict, or embroider', whose past participle pictus also gives us 'picture' and 'pigment'. This passed into Old French as peindre, and the related noun peintour described a person who paints; Middle English borrowed it during the 1300s and reshaped it with the native agent ending -er. The spelling kept the French 'ai' vowel cluster rather than a simple 'a', which is the small trap in the word today. There is also a separate nautical 'painter', the rope used to tie up a boat, and its origin is genuinely uncertain; one well supported idea links it to the Old French pentoir, a cord for hanging things, from Latin pendere 'to hang'. Because the two words look identical, English simply treats them as one spelling with two unrelated histories.
How the word is built
- paint (from Latin pingere: to paint)
- -er (agent suffix: one who does)
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