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missionary-linguist

missionary-linguist noun: a missionary who seeks to study a people's language in order to facilitate religious conversion.

Noun

missionary-linguist (plural missionary-linguists)

  1. A missionary who seeks to study a people's language in order to facilitate religious conversion.
    • although we do not meet among the missionary linguists that marvellous variety of languages which excites our wonder, yet we find in them abundant evidences of a solid and practical scholarship1858, C. W. Russell, The Life of Cardinal Mezzofanti, page 29
    • While he had fulfilled what was expected of him as a missionary linguist, his eagerness for the welfare of the Africans led him to occupy himself with other plans1881, John Ebenezer Honeyman Thomson, Memoir of George Thomson, Cameroon Mountains, West Africa, by one of his nephews, page 20

Examples of missionary-linguist in a sentence

  • the valuable work of the excellent and indefatigable missionary-linguist, the late Father Marcoux, on the Iroquois language, is about to be published by the Bureau of ethnology.1883, H. Hale, “The Iroquois institutions and language”, in Science, volume 2, number 36, page 497:
  • Even the famous missionary-linguist J.G.1979, J.G. Platvoet, “The Akan Believer and his Religions”, in Official and Popular Religion: Analysis of a Theme for Religious Studies...

Forms of missionary-linguist

pluralmissionary-linguists
alternative formmissionary linguist

Questions about missionary-linguist

What does missionary-linguist mean?
Missionary-linguist means a missionary who seeks to study a people's language in order to facilitate religious conversion.
How do you use missionary-linguist in a sentence?
the valuable work of the excellent and indefatigable missionary-linguist, the late Father Marcoux, on the Iroquois language, is about to be published by the Bureau of ethnology.
What part of speech is missionary-linguist?
Missionary-linguist is a noun.
What is the plural of missionary-linguist?
The plural of missionary-linguist is missionary-linguists.

Words near missionary-linguist in the dictionary

  1. missionary positions
  2. missionary rector
  3. missionary rectors
  4. Missionary Ridge
  5. missionary zeal
  6. missionary-linguist
  7. missionary-linguists
  8. missionarying
  9. missionaryism
  10. missionaryize
  11. missionaryized

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: missionary-linguist (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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