Divinour

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An archaic word for a person who foretells future events or discovers hidden knowledge through supernatural means
2. A former term for someone who claims to predict the future or reveal secrets by occult or mystical methods
3. An obsolete name for a soothsayer, a seer who professes to read omens and foresee what lies ahead

Etymology: "Divinour" is an obsolete spelling of "diviner," and it reached Middle English from Latin "dīvīnātor," a word meaning diviner, fortune-teller or soothsayer. That Latin noun came from the verb "dīvīnāre," meaning to foresee or foretell, so the word's core idea is prediction rather than the modern sense of someone who finds water with a forked stick. The English form took shape through the Middle English "divinour," which kept the Latin base and added the agent ending that English uses for people who perform an action. The same Latin source also gave English "divinator," so the two are doublets, separate borrowings of one word that entered English by different routes and ended up with different spellings.

Synonyms: soothsayer, augur, seer, prophet, fortuneteller