raconteur

<font size="-1" face="arial, helvetica"> <p> <strong> <font color="#000066">Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for December 18, 2023 is:</font> </strong> </p> <p> <strong>raconteur</strong> &#149; \ra-kahn-TER\&nbsp; &#149; <em>noun</em><br /> <p>A raconteur is someone who excels in telling <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anecdote">anecdotes</a>.</p> <p>// A <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bona%20fide">bona fide</a> <em>raconteur</em>, Paola can turn even mundane experiences into hilariously entertaining stories.</p> <p><a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/raconteur">See the entry ></a></p> </p> <p> <strong>Examples:</strong><br /> <p>“He [filmmaker and author <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kenneth-Anger">Kenneth Anger</a>] lit and shot and cut images so that no matter how beautiful each was on its own, you had to ingest the totality like a potion and let it do its work if you wanted to get anything out of it. Most viewers weren’t interested in his kind of visual poetry, recognizing him mainly as a <em>raconteur</em>.” — Matt Zoller Seitz, <em>Vulture</em>, 27 May 2023</p> </p> <p> <strong>Did you know?</strong><br /> <p>If you’re a sage of sagas, a bard of ballads, or a pro in prose, you may have lost count of the accounts you’ve recounted. Some might call you a recounter, but as a master of narrative form you may find that <em>recounter</em> lacks a certain <a href="https://bit.ly/4a0OTzd">je ne sais quoi</a>. Sure, it has a cool story—it traces back to the Latin verb <em>computere</em>, meaning “to count”—but so do many words: <em>compute</em> and <em>computer</em>, <em>count</em> and <em>account</em>, and neither last nor least, <em>raconteur</em>, a <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/singsong">singsong</a> title better fit for a whimsical storyteller. English speakers borrowed <em>raconteur</em> from French in the early 19th century.</p> <br /><br /> </p> </fo