appreciator
nounEtymology From appreciate + -or and Latin appreciātor.
› Someone who appreciates a given thing, especially:
1
Someone who values something highly.
- I find, too, that the chance for appreciation [of imaginative literature] is much increased by being the son of an appreciator, and that these boys who now grow up are caught not only years too late, but two or three births too late, to make the best scholars of.1860, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Culture”, in The Conduct of Life, Boston: Ticknor and Fields, page 142:
- […] I speak as an appreciator of not just the architecture but the way you have preserved its atmosphere,1993, Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy, New York: HarperCollins, page 448:
2
Someone who assesses or appraises the value of something.
- Let no chicaning intermediate agent but suffered to pass between the manufacturers and the Company’s warehouse-keepers and sorters, except the sworn appreciators and examiners, according to standard samples, secreted from the view, and from every possible communication with the owners.1779, William Thomson, Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa, London: J. Murray, published 1782, Letter 47, p. 120:
- 1794, Review of The Age of Infidelity, in The English Review, Volume 24, p. 124, that respectable collector and appreciator of religious evidence, Archdeacon Paley
2 more examples
- I like to keep myself well within the field of the microscope, and, with as much detachment as I can muster, to watch myself live, to report my observations of what I say, feel, think. In default of others, I am myself my own spectator and self-appreciator―critical, discerning, vigilant, fond!—my own stupid Boswell, shrewd if silly.1919 March 31, W[ilhelm] N[ero] P[ilate] Barbellion [pseudonym; Bruce Frederick Cummings], “[1915] March 4”, in The Journal of a Disappointed Man, London: Chatto & Windus, published 27 April 1920 (5th impression), →OCLC, part II (In London), pages 179–180:
- Always, as I wrote, I was both reader and writer, both the conceiver of the action and the appreciator of it.1940, Richard Wright, Native Son, New York: Harper and Row, published 1966, page xxxi: