Word.ws English Dictionary

gilder

Syllables: gild·er/ˈɡɪldə//ˈɡɪldɚ/

gilder noun: one who gilds; especially one whose occupation is to overlay things with gold. Also the alternative spelling of guilder.

gilder: one who gilds; especially one whose occupation is to overlay things with gold
Image: Dat doris, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

gilder (plural gilders)

  1. One who gilds; especially one whose occupation is to overlay things with gold.
    • A lady ſhould, indeed, ſtudie her face, when wee thinke ſhee ſleepes: nor, when the dores are ſhut, ſhould men bee inquiring, all is ſacred within, then. [...] you ſee guilders will not worke, but inclos'd. They muſt not diſcouer, how little ſerues, with the helpe of art, to adorne a great deale.1609 December (first performance), Beniamin Ionson [i.e., Ben Jonson], “Epicoene, or The Silent Woman. A Comœdie. […]”, in The Workes of Beniamin Ionson (First Folio), London: […] Will[iam] Stansby...
    • The leather gilders lay a Couch of water and whites of eggs on the leather, before they apply the leaf gold or ſilver.1735, [John Barrow], “COUCH”, in Dictionarium Polygraphicum: Or, The Whole Body of Arts Regularly Digested. […], volume I (A–H), London: […] C[harles] Hitch and C[harles] Davis […], and S[amuel]...

Proper noun capitalized: Gilder

Gilder (plural Gilders)

  1. A surname.
    • Albert Bigelow Paine, his biographer to be and literary executor, who has been constantly with him, said that for the last year at least Mr. Clemens had been weary of life. When Richard Watson Gilder died, he said: "How fortunate he is. No good fortune of that kind ever comes to me."1910 April 22, “Mark Twain is Dead at 74”, in The New York Times

Also used as

gilder is also the alternative spelling of guilder.

gilder meaning in Arabic

gilder in Arabic

one who gilds
دَجَّال dajjāl, دَجَّالَة dajjāla, طَلَّاء ṭallāʔ

Examples of gilder in a sentence

  • He was a painter and gilder. [...] Now could the poor gilder no longer get paid by his employers.1810 January, “O.” [pseudonym], “Remarkable Benevolence”, in The Christian’s Magazine: Designed to Promote the Knowledge and Influence of...
  • Charles Shaw was born in Tunstall, in the Potteries, in 1832, the son of a skilled painter and gilder in the pottery trade who lost this well-paid job through victimization after a strike.1974, “An Old Potter”, in John Burnett, editor, Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s, London: Allen...
  • On the Costa, a street full of gilders, carpenters, carvers, and stucco experts, their status as Inglesi—bourgeois as well as fine artists—set them apart.1996, Carolyn Burke, “Anglo-Florence (1907–10)”, in Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy, New York, N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux...
  • Indeed, economic resource, previously assigned to physical ornamentation, the gold of the gilder, is here plowed into the control right down to the last half-millimeter.2014, Francesca Hughes, “Error and Surface: Counted Away: Indexicality and the Sublimation of Ornament: (Hermine) Wittgenstein’s Radiator”...

Forms of gilder

Noun
pluralgilders
alternative formguilder
Proper noun
pluralGilders

Origin of gilder

From Middle English gilder (“gilder; goldsmith”) [and other forms], from gilden (“to cover with gilding, gild; to decorate with gold”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰelh₃- (“green, yellow”)) + -er, -ere (suffix forming agent nouns, especially the names of persons engaged in professions or trades); analysable as gild + -er.

From Middle English gilder (“any of various coins (originally gold), especially in use in Flanders, Germany and Holland”) [and other forms], from Middle Dutch gulden, Middle Low German gulden (“guilder”), influenced by Middle English gilden (“made of gold; covered or decorated with gold; of a gold colour; wealthy; glorious; precious; blessed, happy; relating to the middle way or mean”).

Words formed from gilder

Words that rhyme with gilder

Questions about gilder

What does gilder mean?
Gilder means one who gilds; especially one whose occupation is to overlay things with gold.
What is gilder in Arabic?
Gilder in Arabic is دَجَّال (dajjāl), دَجَّالَة (dajjāla), طَلَّاء (ṭallāʔ). See Gilder meaning in Arabic.
How do you use gilder in a sentence?
He was a painter and gilder. [...] Now could the poor gilder no longer get paid by his employers.
What part of speech is gilder?
Gilder can be a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce gilder?
Gilder is pronounced /ˈɡɪldə/ (UK).
What is the plural of gilder?
The plural of gilder is gilders.

Words near gilder in the dictionary

  1. gilded flickers
  2. gilded the lily
  3. gilded the pill
  4. gilden
  5. gildens
  6. gilder
  7. Gilderoy
  8. gilders
  9. Gildersleeve
  10. Gildersleeves
  11. Gildersome

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gilder (page history and authors); Gilder (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.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-I learned some phrases-gilder.wav, En-us-Gilder.ogg.

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