Other forms: lyricists
A lyricist is somebody who writes the words of songs. A gifted lyricist, the lyricist and the composer, credited as lyricist.
In musical theatre the pairing of lyricist and composer is a named partnership, and the great ones worked together for decades. The job is fitting sense to a shape that already exists, which is why it is closer to puzzle-solving than to poetry.
1nounlyricistSomebody who writes the words of songs.
“The composer wrote the music, and her husband, a gifted lyricist, supplied the clever rhymes.”
lyricist is a writer.
Ancient Greek
λυρικός
Latin
lyricus
French
lyrique
English
lyric
English, today
lyricist
Built from
From lyric + -ist. lyric comes from French lyrique, or its source, Latin lyricus, from Ancient Greek λυρικός, from λύρα (“lyre”). Its English equivalent would be lyre + ic. The original Greek sense of "lyric poetry"—"poetry accompanied by the lyre" i.e. "words set to music"—eventually led to its use as "lyrics", first attested in Stainer and Barrett's 1876 Dictionary of Musical Terms. Stainer and Barrett used the word as a singular substantive: "Lyric, poetry or blank verse intended to be set to music and sung". By the 1930s, the present use of the plurale tantum "lyrics" had begun; it has been standard since the 1950s for many writers. The singular form "lyric" is still used to mean the complete words to a song by authorities such as Alec Wilder, Robert Gottlieb, and Stephen Sondheim. However, the singular form is also commonly used to refer to a specific line (or phrase) within a song's lyrics.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA