logodaedalus

plural logodaedaluses

1. A wordsmith; one who uses language with cleverness and skill.

   What had the ruffian café logodaedalus taught me?

   1971, Edward Dahlberg, The Confessions of Edward Dahlberg, page 206

   4 more examples

   Mr. Auslander is a logodaedalus — a wizard of words — whose adjectives possess an unerring salience, whose vigor is as undinted as he bronze of a Thracian shield.

   1924, Frank Crane, Edward Jewitt Wheeler, Current Opinion, volume 76

   There are digressions on literature and the cinema and the tarot pack and crap-shooting and — above all, since Anthony Burgess has ever been a logodaedalus — language.

   1981, Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, Encounter, volume 56, page 54

   For example, Iain Gale of the Independent wrote of “the logodaedalus's universal sentence, 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,", which uses all the letters of the alphabet.

   2015, Peter E. Meltzer, The Thinker's Thesaurus

   Yet this enterprise was a slippery one; fictitious etymologies and overclever wordplay were the province of the logodaedalus: a dangerously cunning wordsmith..

   2018, Alexander Marr, Raphaele Garrod, Jose Ramon Marcaida, Logodaedalus: Word Histories of Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe