erudit

plural erudits

1. rareAn erudite person, a scholar, especially in French contexts.

   By contrast, however, we have a charming letter from Charles Beard in which he regrets that he never met Lord Acton, an érudit with an encyclopedic mind who published very little.

   1987, Michael Kammen, Selvages and Biases, page 93

   2 more examples

   When the fragments of Petronius made a great noise in the literary world, Meibomius, an erudit of Lubeck, read in a letter from another learned scholar of Bologna, ' We have here an entire Petronius [...].’

   1793, Isaac D'Israeli, Curiosities of Literature, volume II

   One of the striking features of the political battles of the 1750s had been the way in which parlementary critics – and most notably the Jansenist érudit Le Paige – had [...] provided more convincing accounts of national history than the crown was able to mount.

   2002, Colin Jones, The Great Nation, Penguin, published 2003, page 262