soothsayer
noun
Did you know?
The origins are straightforward: a soothsayer is someone who says sooth. You may, however, find that less than enlightening! Sooth is an archaic word meaning "truth" or "reality" that dates from Old English and was used until about the first half of the 17th century. (It is believed to share an ancestor with words suggesting truthfulness and reality in Old Norse, Greek, Old High German, Sanskrit, Latin, and Gothic languages.) Soothsayer itself has been documented in print as far back as the 14th century. Today, it is also a moniker of the insect the mantis, whose name means "prophet" in Greek.
Synonyms
Examples of soothsayer in a Sentence
Chris Willman, Variety, 5 Feb. 2024
That doesn’t mean political soothsayers, amateur and professional, aren’t giving it a go.
—Mark Landler, New York Times, 5 Jan. 2024
According to the soothsayers at McKinsey, this is not just a fable but our modern workplace reality.
—Ira Wolfe, Forbes, 28 Nov. 2023
Political soothsayers also tend to forget that Trump may be spending considerable time early in the year scowling in courtrooms with the possibility of multiple guilty verdicts hovering over the campaign.
—Walter Shapiro, The New Republic, 28 Sep. 2023
According to reporting by noted Apple news soothsayer Mark Gurman, this could be the year Apple begrudgingly adopts the standard, which is ubiquitous across the rest of the electronics industry.
—Boone Ashworth, WIRED, 11 Sep. 2023
Salvatore was saving his life, and doing it with a soothsayer’s ability.
—Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 30 Aug. 2023
During the third and fourth centuries ad, when the ancient world was shaken to its core and everything was changing, there were so many astrologers, clairvoyants, and soothsayers that the popes took fright.
—Olga Tokarczuk, Harper's Magazine, 6 Jan. 2023
Imagine how this show would have been received if the controversy had never happened; if it had been unveiled from his perch as high soothsayer of the industry.
—Vanessa Friedman, New York Times, 6 Mar. 2023
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'soothsayer.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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Cite this Entry
“Soothsayer.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/soothsayer. Accessed 18 Apr. 2024.
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soothsayer
noun
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