pollster

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“
We met in the campaign office where I learned his background as a pollster, as a colleague of Alan Gregg, a focus group facilitator and now a self-employed strategist for corporate clients.

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Definitions (3)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (2)

  1. noun One that takes public-opinion surveys. Also called polltaker.
  2. Word History
    The suffix -ster is nowadays most familiar in words like pollster, jokester, huckster, where it forms agent nouns that typically denote males. Originally in Old English, however, the suffix (then spelled -estre) was used to form feminine agent nouns. Hoppestre, for example, meant "female dancer.” It was occasionally applied to men, but mostly to translate Latin masculine nouns denoting occupations that were usually held by women in Anglo-Saxon society. An example is bæcester, "baker,” glossing Latin pistor; it survives as the Modern English name Baxter. In Middle English its use as a masculine suffix became more common in northern England, while in the south it remained limited to feminines. In time the masculine usage became dominant throughout the country, and old feminines in -ster were refashioned by adding the newer feminine suffix -ess (borrowed from French) to them, such as seamstress remade from seamster. In Modern English, the only noun ending in -ster with a feminine referent is spinster, which originally meant "a woman who spins thread.”

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Examples (50)

  • He quizzed the pollster, and it was done on behalf if Tedisco. —  the albany project - Front Page
  • The job of the pollster is to collect the data, create legible products from them, provide reports on the meaning of the data and then house them for the client in a secure database - but ultimately, the data belong to the client. —  The Moderate Voice
  • We met in the campaign office where I learned his background as a pollster, as a colleague of Alan Gregg, a focus group facilitator and now a self-employed strategist for corporate clients. —  Steve Janke: Angry in the Great White North
  • If a pollster was commissioned to do it I expect it would take tens of thousands of phone calls to produce the 1,200 responses I received in my online survey. —  Andrew Norton
  • In addition, only the most recent poll from a pollster is retained for each state. —  Hotline On Call
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