detailist

detailist noun: a person who is detail-oriented; One who focuses on detail.

Noun

detailist (plural detailists)

A person who is detail-oriented; One who focuses on detail.
- In cost department work ability as a detailist is exceptionally desirable in the work of making entries.1915, Hugo Diemer, Industrial Organization and Management, page 263
- Dr. Kober has always been a great detailist without being small or petty, a particularist without being narrow or prejudiced.1920, Francis Anthony Tondorf, Anniversary Tribute to George Martin Kober
An artist who produces highly detailed work.
- The simple art of the detailist would compel him to draw every flower that he saw : the suggestive artist, with his more vigorous appeal to the imagination, would get the effect by setting a few in the immediate foreground, and still fewer scattered over the middle distance.1889, The Japan Daily Mail, page 424
- The detailist fills his canvas with work and interest; the full-souled painter concentrates his detail upon a few salient points.1890, The Photo-beacon - Volume 2, page 86

detailist (comparative more detailist, superlative most detailist)

Detail-oriented
- The lawyer-like regulatory systems exhibit qualities and flaws not unknown in the parent profession. They are moral and preachy, careful and slow, professional and inbred, studious and detailist.1969, Richard E. Stewart, “The Wages of Fear in Insurance Regulation”, in Ins. Negl. & Comp. L. Proc.
- Strengthening these aspects would also free law teaching from too detailist knowledge.2015, Carel Stolker, Rethinking the Law School: Education, Research, Outreach and Governance, →ISBN
Highly detailed.
- This question is not only concerned with detailist information, but in terms of its stem, all answers are correct except kingdoms, for phyla are, indeed, divided into all of the last four categories, even though the student is supposed to ferret out (4) as the immediate sub-division concerned...1964 December, William V. Mayer, “The Impact of Testing on New Curricula”, in The American Biology Teacher, volume 26, number 8
- What can be said, though, is that it contains more unplotted detail than its predecessors. It is more vulgar—more detailist—than any prior realism.2006 January, Evan Cory Horowitz, “Ulysses: Mired in the Universal”, in Modernism/modernity, volume 13, number 1

He is the scientist, not as particularizer and detailist, but as the forceful synthesizer of a truly vast amount of apparently unrelated objects, events, and structures.1996, Larry T. Reynolds, Leonard Lieberman, Race and Other Misadventures, →ISBN:
The whole thing must have been rehearsed many times, for the detailist would overlook no detail.2010, Clinton H. Stagg, The Problemist, →ISBN:
His canvases are worked over with painstaking care, not as the detailist works to delineate buttons and boot-straps, but for harmonies of tender color and the charm of reflected light.1903, Harper's Monthly Magazine - Volume 107, page 638:
But when we come to examine the fundamental reasons for nature's supremacy over all art, even the noblest, we find it in the fact that nature is the transcendent detailist.1915, Country Life in America - Volume 28, page 34:

From detail + -ist.

What does detailist mean?: Detailist means a person who is detail-oriented; One who focuses on detail.
How do you use detailist in a sentence?: He is the scientist, not as particularizer and detailist, but as the forceful synthesizer of a truly vast amount of apparently unrelated objects, events, and structures.
What part of speech is detailist?: Detailist can be a noun or an adjective.
What is the plural of detailist?: The plural of detailist is detailists.

Adapted from Wiktionary: detailist (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Cite this entry: “detailist.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/detailist. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.