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Definition of "sonneteer" [son•net•eer]

  • A composer of sonnets. (noun)
  • An inferior poet. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Use "sonneteer" in a sentence
  • "We all know Michelangelo as painter, sculptor, sonneteer and, lately, gay role model."
  • "The bookseller knows that most persons keeping houses are desirous of small libraries, and require abridgments and new tables, orders an abridgment of the history of Rapin Thoyras, or of the church; a collection of bon mots from the Menagiana, or a dictionary of great men, in which some obscure pedant is placed by the side of Cicero, and a sonneteer of Italy as near as possible to Virgil."
  • "Here, perhaps, is that quotation of Seamus Heaney in context: Auden was an epoch-making poet on public themes, the register of a new sensibility, a great sonneteer, a writer of perfect light verse, a prospector of language at its most illiterate roots and a dandy of lexicography at its most extravagant reaches."