Stylist

How to spell stylist

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce stylist

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does stylist mean?

1. nounA person whose job is to arrange hair, clothing, or overall appearance attractively.
2. nounA writer or speaker noted for an elegant, distinctive manner of expression.

Stylist in a sentence

• The stylist trimmed and layered her hair before the wedding.

• Critics praised the novelist as a meticulous prose stylist.

• A wardrobe stylist selected every outfit for the magazine shoot.

• As a stylist, she polished every clause until the rhythm felt right.

Where does stylist come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word stylist grows out of the Latin stilus, which was the pointed instrument used to scratch letters into a wax tablet. Because a person's manner of writing depended on how they wielded that instrument, the meaning drifted from the physical tool to a writer's distinctive way of expressing themselves, and so 'style' came to mean a characteristic manner of doing anything. English added the agent suffix -ist, borrowed through French and ultimately from Greek -istes 'one who does', to coin stylist in the early 1800s for a writer admired for elegant prose. Over the twentieth century the sense broadened to fashion and grooming, giving us the hair stylist and the wardrobe stylist. A common spelling trap is the single 'l': despite 'style', the modern spelling keeps just one before -ist, and the silent 'e' of 'style' is dropped entirely.

How the word is built

• styl- (from Latin stilus: a writing tool, later 'style')
• -ist (one who practises)