allegorist

[ al-i-gawr-ist, -gohr-, al-i-ger-ist ]

noun

1. a person who uses or writes allegory.

Word History and Origins

Origin of allegorist¹

First recorded in 1675–85; allegor(ize) + -ist

Example Sentences

In an interview that Baldwin gave with Quincy Troupe toward the end of his life, he said that Toni was an allegorist, but that’s not really true.

From The New Yorker

Fussell writes of her first encounter with Fisher’s work in the 1960s as she was about to embark her own career: “That she could write so wittily, learnedly, and sexily about a subject as base as food shocked my Puritan upbringing and threatened my literary snobbery. But as I gobbled up her pages, I saw that food was merely the ruse of this libidinous oyster-eater, wolf-killer, gastronomical storyteller, kitchen allegorist, American humorist, metaphysical wit. She was an American original and a writer of the first order.”

From Washington Post

He was primarily an allegorist who folded mythic figures into otherworldly visions of pagan religiosity.

From New York Times

Erró, the Icelandic painter who has been friends with Mr. Rosenquist since the two met in New York in the early 1960s, would instead be a late-medieval religious allegorist.

From New York Times

As an allegorist, Birk is at once simplistic and uncannily insightful.

From Washington Post

Related Words

• liar
• narrator
• raconteur
• writer