Definitions

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

  • noun One who provides explanatory glosses, especially a scholar or scribe who writes notes in the margins of or between the lines of a text.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The writer of a gloss; a glossarist; a scholiast.
  • noun Specifically, one of a class of jurists in the middle ages who wrote short notes or glosses on the Corpus Juris Civilis.

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

  • noun rare A writer of glosses or comments; a commentator.

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

  • noun historical A legal scholar of the Middle Ages, specifically one who authored commentaries or glosses on legal texts (often the Corpus Juris of Justinian).

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Medieval Latin glōssātor, from glōssāre, to gloss, from Latin glōssa, foreign word requiring explanation; see gloss.]

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Examples

Comments

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  • (noun) - He that makes a glosse or comment to interpret the hard meaning of words or things.

    --Edward Phillips' New World of English Words, 1598

    January 16, 2018