author

author

1. noun. An author is a male or a female writer; authoress is widely regarded as depreciatory or even offensive. when used by men, although women writers still use it occasionally of themselves

• (The authoress would like to dedicate this story to her father —website, AmE 2004 [OEC]).

2. verb. The verb is 16c, some two centuries later than the noun, and has been used both transitively and intransitively, although in current use it is typically transitive:

• Whenever the students thought they were evaluating the work of a man, they assessed it as far more impressive than when they thought it was authored by a woman —M. Ross, 1989

• During his professional career, he has authored more than 250 technical and marketing publications —Apply Magazine, AmE 2003.

Since the mid-20c this use of author has been greatly extended in AmE and BrE with reference to areas of activity outside the arts, such as sport and the cinema, and even crime

• (Pinochet's life over the past three years has been a miserable story of unending flight —from legions of prosecutors the world over determined to bring him to book for crimes he is alleged to have authored —Time Magazine, 2004).

Co-author, meaning to share authorship, is now common.

3. Authoring is a recent addition to the language of computing, and means ‘the process of creating multimedia documents for electronic publishing’:

• In order to profit from the possibilities of hypertext, teachers have to be provided with powerful authoring environments which allow them to create complex hypertexts. —Literary and Linguistic Computing, 1992.