orientalist
nounEtymology From oriental + -ist.
1
Architecture, Art, Arts, Literature, Media, Publishing Dated A scholar who studies the Orient; a person interested in the Orient.
- 1684, George Bright, preface to The works of the Reverend and learned John Lightfoot D. D. Which is rendred somewhat more probable by that very learned Orientalist Dr. Pocok, who tells us the Arabick verb Hausch answering to the Hebrew חיש signifies three things, viz. to hast, to fear, to be ashamed.
- If, however, Orientalists be right in their interpretation of the name of Artaxerxes' queen, Parisatis, as Pari-zadeh (Peri-born), the Peri must be coeval with the religion of Zoroaster.1828, Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology, volume I, London: William Harrison Ainsworth, page 27:
2 more examples
- Moreover, among the group that was associated with the short-lived Institut historique, of which Senancour was a member from 1834 to 1840, was Eugène Burnouf, the great orientalist, to whom much of the responsibility for the revived interest in orientalism of the mid-nineteenth century must be attributed.1935, Iris Esther Robertson Sells, Matthew Arnold and France, London: Cambridge University Press, page 67:
- The splendid nineteenth-century Oxford Orientalist David Margoliouth (described by Irwin as having “the kind of beautiful mind that could see patterns where none existed”) was perhaps not so eccentric when he claimed to notice analogies “between the founder of Islam and Brigham Young, the founder of the Mormon faith.”2007 March 23, Christopher Hitchens, “East is East”, in The Atlantic, →ISSN:
- Related terms
- oriental, orientalism