playwright

UK/ˈpleɪˌɹaɪt/US/ˈpleɪˌɹaɪt/

nounB2+Common in everyday speech and writing · #7,109 of 15,258mostly written

Other forms: playwrights

A playwright is a person who writes plays for the theatre. A young playwright, the playwright's notes, Britain's greatest playwright.

The spelling is wright, not write, and that is the point: a wright is a maker, as in shipwright and wheelwright, so a playwright builds a play rather than merely writing one. Ben Jonson used the word as an insult before it settled into a job title.

Definitions of playwright

1nounplaywrightA person who writes plays.B2+
“The playwright sat in the back row on opening night, watching the audience.”

playwright is a writer.

Also accepted in games: dramatist

Where it comes from

Play plus wright, a maker, from Old English wyrhta, a worker. The spelling has nothing to do with write.

From play + wright.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Music, Art & Culture

Practise this word

playwright in the wild

William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet and actor.
William Shakespeare
Ben Jonson coined the term playwright and is the first person in English literature to refer to playwrights as separate from poets.
Playwright
The earliest playwrights in Western literature with surviving works are the Ancient Greeks.
Playwright
Along with contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama.
Tennessee Williams
Typically, these are three or four critics, complemented by academics or playwrights.
Pulitzer Prize for Drama

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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