hack writer
2
7.5
- noun
- Offensive
- A serious writer and a hack writer (his Edgar Box novels).
Examples
-
It's the work of a hack writer and a past-it director.
Blog text (10) -
He is happy to be engrossed in a nineteenth-century book about a woman who is a hack writer and a society hound, a woman who wants little more than to marry well.
Fiction book (2000) -
I sometimes forget that I can be a hack writer when I want to be.
Blog text (12) -
A hack writer comes up with a great novel.
Fiction book (1999) -
I was wondering how those hack writers were gonna wrap things up.
-
"It is a fair point to make about his approach, but it was a hell of a lot fresher in 1996, before he became the King of DC and every other hack writer had ripped off this trick, than it is now.
Blog text (12) -
The studio in Bombay kept a whole office of hack writers to do titles, with Hindi rhyming dictionaries at their elbows.
Fiction book (1993) -
These brutally satiric stories, written mainly for money, give us Hollywood through the eyes of a hack writer—not Fitzgerald himself, but the kind of facile
Academic text (2000) -
Many consider him a hack writer because he churns out books that lack depth and originality.
-
The movie was filled with clichés, typical of a hack writer trying to meet deadline pressures.
Synonyms
96
7.5
A person who does dull, routine work, especially writing
2
8.2
A writer, often a journalist, who people think is not very skilled
1
8.5
A writer who writes many low-quality books mostly for money
A writer who makes many bad articles for little pay
How Skilled
Surface Forms
Morphology
The noun compound is compositional: 'hack' (a low-quality, routine or mercenary worker) modifies 'writer' (someone who composes text), so the overall meaning — a low-quality or mercenary writer — follows directly from the parts. This modifier+head pattern is a common and transparent word-formation type, so a B1 learner who knows both constituent meanings would readily infer the MWE meaning.
Etymology
The term hack writer comes from hack, an old word for a horse or a worker people could hire to do small jobs for money. So a hack writer is a writer who works just to earn money and often produces 'low-quality' or rushed work.