Vaticinators

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. People who make predictions about future occurrences through intuition or special insight
2. Persons involved in foretelling events or outcomes based on mystical or prophetic means
3. Individuals who foresee future events using insight or intuition

Etymology: "Vaticinators" is the plural of "vaticinator", a noun for someone who foretells the future. The singular comes from Latin "vaticinari", meaning to prophesy or utter predictions, and it is built on "vates", a Latin word for a seer, poet or inspired prophet. Latin writers used "vates" for figures who were thought to speak under divine inspiration, so the word carried a sense of sacred utterance as much as ordinary guessing. The English term follows the same pattern as many Latin-derived agent nouns: the verb stem plus the suffix "-or", which marks the person who performs the action. Because the word stayed close to its learned Latin source, it reads as formal and somewhat bookish, which is why it is more often found in scholarly or literary writing than in everyday speech.

Synonyms: prophets, seers, soothsayers, diviners, oracles