Word.ws English Dictionary

prooflistener

prooflistener noun: one who listens, usually to a recording, for errors.

Noun

prooflistener (plural prooflisteners)

  1. (rare) One who listens, usually to a recording, for errors.
    • Often a prooflistener could clearly discriminate the words after repeated listening to a passage which the transcriber had previously found unintelligible.1979, Hartvig Dahl, “Characteristics of the Corpus”, in Word Frequencies of Spoken American English, Essex, Conn.; Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire: Verbatim, →ISBN, page v, column 1
    • Wolfram Kandinsky, who does narration and voice-overs on television programs and played roles on “Radio Mystery Theater,” says: “The hard part is reading so much material without getting to rehearse it. The easy part is erasing and redoing lines you don’t think you did right.” SOMETIMES THE latter...1979 June 11, Michael Hirsley, “Tied up in traffic? Read a book-on-tape”, in Chicago Tribune, 132nd year, number 162, Chicago, Ill., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 14, column 1

Examples of prooflistener in a sentence

  • The easy part is erasing and redoing lines you don’t think you did right.” SOMETIMES THE latter becames^([sic]) an argument between the reader and a “prooflistener.” All books are proofread.1979 June 11, Michael Hirsley, “Tied up in traffic? Read a book-on-tape”, in Chicago Tribune, 132nd year, number 162, Chicago, Ill., →ISSN...
  • Time and again, her skill as a proofreader and her patience as a “prooflistener” helped her husband through rocky patches in his pilgrimage with the Popes.2003 November 6, Stephen J. Davis, “Acknowledgments”, in The Early Coptic Papacy: The Egyptian Church and Its Leadership in Late Antiquity...

Forms of prooflistener

pluralprooflisteners
alternative formproof-listener

Origin of prooflistener

From proof + listener, modelled on earlier proofreader.

Questions about prooflistener

What does prooflistener mean?
Prooflistener means one who listens, usually to a recording, for errors.
How do you use prooflistener in a sentence?
The easy part is erasing and redoing lines you don’t think you did right.” SOMETIMES THE latter becames^([sic]) an argument between the reader and a “prooflistener.” All books are proofread.
What part of speech is prooflistener?
Prooflistener is a noun.
What is the plural of prooflistener?
The plural of prooflistener is prooflisteners.

Words near prooflistener in the dictionary

  1. prooflessly
  2. prooflessness
  3. prooflike
  4. prooflisten
  5. prooflistened
  6. prooflistener
  7. prooflisteners
  8. prooflistening
  9. prooflistens
  10. proofmark
  11. proofmarks

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: prooflistener (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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