Definitions

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

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

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A composer of sonnets or small poems: usually with a touch of contempt.
  • To compose sonnets; rime.

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

  • intransitive verb To compose sonnets.
  • noun A composer of sonnets, or small poems; a small poet; -- usually in contempt.

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

  • noun A writer of sonnets.
  • verb To compose sonnets.

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

  • noun a poet who writes sonnets

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From sonnet +‎ -eer

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Examples

  • We all know Michelangelo as painter, sculptor, sonneteer and, lately, gay role model.

    All I Want For Christmas... 2008

  • 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.

    A Philosophical Dictionary 2007

  • 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.

    A poet in full ... Frank Wilson 2007

  • At that point, turning his thought around with the functional word 'Yet', the sonneteer finds consolation in friendship.

    Shakespeare Bevington, David 2002

  • He has been most successful in classical travesties and witty turns of language, and he has won a good place as a sonneteer.

    The Canadian Elocutionist Anna Kelsey Howard

  • On the contrary, the greatness of a lover's passion seemed to increase in proportion to the magnitude of its object, and a voluminous damsel, arrayed in a dozen of petticoats, was declared by a Low Dutch sonneteer of the province to be radiant as a sunflower and luxuriant as a full-blown cabbage.

    Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 Charles Herbert Sylvester

  • Lowell is too elastic, impulsive, for a sonneteer.

    The Continental Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 2, February, 1862 Devoted To Literature And National Policy Various

  • Paul Hayne had won already the hearts of his own readers; and had gained transatlantic meed, in Tennyson's declaration that he was "the sonneteer of America!"

    Four Years in Rebel Capitals An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death T. C. DeLeon

  • Charlotte Smith, the sonneteer and novelist, was the daughter of

    Highways & Byways in Sussex E.V. Lucas

  • The conceit of the sonneteer is that the fever is an enemy luxuriously lodged in the lovely person of its victim, and there insidiously plotting against her life: --

    Classic French Course in English William Cleaver Wilkinson

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