Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun One who claims to be able to foretell events or predict the future; a seer.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun One who tells the truth; a truthful person.
  • noun One who prognosticates: a diviner: generally used of a pretender to prophetic powers.
  • noun A mantis or rearhorse. See cut under Mantidæ. Also called camel-cricket, praying-mantis, devil's horse, devil's race-horse, etc.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun One who foretells events by the art of soothsaying; a prognosticator.
  • noun (Zoöl.) A mantis.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun obsolete One who tells the truth; a truthful person.
  • noun One who predicts the future, using magic, intuition or intelligence; a diviner.
  • noun A mantis or rearhorse.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun someone who makes predictions of the future (usually on the basis of special knowledge)

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English sothsaier, zothziggere, equivalent to sooth +‎ sayer.

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Examples

Comments

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  • "A mantis or rearhorse. See cut under Mantidæ. Also called camel-cricket, praying-mantis, devil's horse, devil's race-horse, etc. Synonyms Seer, etc. See prophet." --CD&C

    May 21, 2012

  • "a soothsayer of the ‘singularity’ (when humans will merge with machines, and as a consequence live forever)"

    Source: The most avid believers in artificial intelligence are aggressively secular – yet their language is eerily religious. Why?

    January 22, 2018