Playwright

How to spell playwright

10 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce playwright

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does playwright mean?

1. nounA person who writes plays for the theatre.

Playwright in a sentence

• The playwright spent two years drafting the new stage drama.

• As a working playwright, she earned royalties from every theatre production.

Where does playwright come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word joins two old English elements: 'play', meaning a dramatic work for the stage, and 'wright', from the Old English wyrhta, which simply meant a worker or maker of things. The same wright survives in trades like wheelwright (a maker of wheels), cartwright (a maker of carts), and shipwright (a builder of ships), and it shares a deep root with the verb 'to work'. A playwright is therefore literally a maker of plays, just as a shipwright is a maker of ships, and the term was coined in English around the early 1600s. The spelling trap is that nothing is actually written: it is wright, the worker, not write, the verb, even though playwrights obviously do write. Ben Jonson is recorded mocking the word in the early seventeenth century, treating these dramatists as mere craftsmen rather than poets, which neatly underlines that the -wright ending always meant a maker by trade.

How the word is built

• play (a stage drama)
• wright (from Old English wyrhta: a maker or worker)