Brickmaker

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A person or craftsperson whose occupation involves manufacturing bricks from clay or other materials
2. A professional who specializes in the creation of bricks, utilizing materials such as clay that are shaped and hardened through a firing process
3. An individual engaged in the production of building materials from clay or similar substances, which are formed and then hardened by heat

Etymology: "Brickmaker" is a plain compound: "brick" joined to "maker," meaning one who makes something. The word appears in Middle English as "brekemeker" and "breke maker," so the two parts were already fused into a single term by the medieval period, when English speakers were producing a great deal of brick. That timing matters. Brick was relatively uncommon in England for much of the early Middle Ages, when most buildings were timber or stone, and it became a prestigious building material later. The "maker" half is an old, productive English element, used for countless trades such as "shoemaker" and "wheelwright"-style compounds, so the word follows an entirely native pattern rather than borrowing anything foreign. The "brick" half is worth a note too. It entered English from Middle Dutch or Middle Low German, where the sense of a fired clay block was established, and it replaced older native words for such objects. So "brickmaker" combines a loanword with a native agent suffix, a common mix in English trade names.

Synonyms: bricklayer, mason