Word of the DayFriday, February 10, 2006
autodidact
\aw-toh-DY-dakt\ , noun:1.
One who is self-taught.
Quotes:
He is our ultimate autodidact, a man who made himself from nothing into a lawyer, a legislator -- a president.
-- Kevin Baker, "Log Cabin Values", New York Times, April 2, 2000
Consider the autodidact in Sartre's Nausea, who is somewhat unbelievably working his way alphabetically through an entire library.
-- James Wood, "Human, All Too Inhuman", New Republic, July 24, 2000
Buck's prose is a lot better than you'd expect from a high-school dropout, but he turns out to be a reader and autodidact.
-- Jonathan Yardley, review of North Star over My Shoulder: A Flying Life, by Bob Buck, Washington Post, April 7, 2002
Origin:
Autodidact is from Greek autodidaktos, "self-taught," from auto-, "self" + didaktos, "taught," from didaskein, "to teach."
