dialectician

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   a person skilled in dialectic or in reaching conclusions through structured reasoning and argument

   Plato presents the trained dialectician as someone able to test every assumption.

2. 2
   noun

   a person who studies dialects or dialect variation

   The dialectician recorded how vowel sounds changed from one valley to the next.

Borrowed from French dialecticien, formed from dialectique, 'dialectic,' + -ien, corresponding to English -ian. The philosophical sense is recorded from the sixteenth century; a later sense names a student of regional dialects.

Topics