zitherist, n.

zitherist
http://www.oed.com/dictionary/zitherist_n%3Ftab%3Dmeaning_and_use
Revised 2021

# zitheristnoun

## Factsheet

### What does the noun zitherist mean?

There is one meaning in OED's entry for the noun zitherist. See ‘Meaning & use’ for definition, usage, and quotation evidence.

### How common is the noun zitherist?

Fewer than 0.01occurrences per million words in modern written English

1860 | 0.0002
1870 | 0.0002
1880 | 0.0002
1890 | 0.0003
1900 | 0.0003
1910 | 0.0003
1920 | 0.0003
1930 | 0.0004
1940 | 0.0004
1950 | 0.0004
1960 | 0.0003
1970 | 0.0003
1980 | 0.0003
1990 | 0.0003
2000 | 0.0003
2010 | 0.0003

### Where does the noun zitherist come from?

Earliest known use

1860s

The earliest known use of the noun zitherist is in the 1860s.

OED's earliest evidence for zitherist is from 1866, in the writing of Anthony Trollope, novelist.

### Nearby entries

1. zirkelite, n. 1895–
2. zit, n. 1912–
3. zit cream, n. 1968–
4. zitella, n. a1660–
5. zit-face, n. 1974–
6. zit-faced, adj. 1971–
7. zither, n. 1831–
8. zither, v. 1889–
9. zither banjo, n. 1888–
10. zithering, adj. 1889–
11. zitherist, n.1866–
12. zither-like, adj. 1881–
13. ziti, n. 1845–
14. zitty, adj. 1971–
15. Ziv, n. a1382–
16. zizania, n. 1526–
17. zizany, n. a1400–1803
18. zizel, n. 1775–
19. zizypha, n. 1546–1775
20. zizyphus, n.?1440–
21. zizz, v. 1883–

## Meaning & use

1. 1866–
   A person who plays the zither.
   Stressed as ˈzitherist.
   1. 1866

      > The zither was brought forward, and a chair was put for the zitherist, and Herr Crippel stood for a moment behind his chair and bowed.

      A. Trollope in Every Saturday 28 July 101/2
   2. 2017

      > The pianist and zitherist Laraaji, who..released some twenty albums in the eighties.

      New Yorker (Nexis) 24 April 98
   music
   1. zither player 1850–
      General use as a modifier, and with verbal nouns and participles forming compounds in which zither expresses the object of the underlying verb, as in…
   2. zitherist 1866–
      A person who plays the zither.
   3. guslar 1891–
      One who plays the gusle; a singer of traditional epic poems.
   View in Historical Thesaurus

## Frequency

zitherist typically occurs fewer than 0.01 times per million words in modern written English.

zitherist is in frequency band 1, which contains words occurring fewer than 0.001 times per million words in modern written English. More about OED's frequency bands

Frequency data is computed programmatically, and should be regarded as an estimate.

### Frequency of zitherist, n., 1860–2010

* Occurrences per million words in written English

Historical frequency series are derived from Google Books Ngrams (version 2), a data set based on the Google Books corpus of several million books printed in English between 1500 and 2010.

The overall frequency for a given word is calculated by summing frequencies for the main form of the word, any plural or inflected forms, and any major spelling variations.

For sets of homographs (distinct entries that share the same word-form, e.g. mole, n.¹, mole, n.², mole, n.³, etc.), we have estimated the frequency of each homograph entry as a fraction of the total Ngrams frequency for the word-form. This may result in inaccuracies.

Smoothing has been applied to series for lower-frequency words, using a moving-average algorithm. This reduces short-term fluctuations, which may be produced by variability in the content of the Google Books corpus.

Decade | Frequency per million words
--- | ---
1860 | 0.0002
1870 | 0.0002
1880 | 0.0002
1890 | 0.0003
1900 | 0.0003
1910 | 0.0003
1920 | 0.0003
1930 | 0.0004
1940 | 0.0004
1950 | 0.0004
1960 | 0.0003
1970 | 0.0003
1980 | 0.0003
1990 | 0.0003
2000 | 0.0003
2010 | 0.0003

Originally published as part of the entry for zither, n.

zither, n. was revised in March 2021.