How to Use autodidact in a Sentence

autodidact

noun
  • Mering is a movie lover, a big reader, and something of an autodidact.
    — Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, 31 Oct. 2022
  • Hoffer was a longshoreman and an autodidact who wrote slender books hefty with wisdom.
    — George Will, National Review, 20 Dec. 2017
  • My mother was an incredible autodidact, sharp and creative in her own right.
    — Françoise Mouly, The New Yorker, 12 Dec. 2022
  • But Korelitz has made her young autodidact far more conflicted.
    — Ron Charles, Washington Post, 31 May 2022
  • Clark had always fashioned himself an autodidact and proceeded to scour the murky corners of the web looking for answers.
    — Sam Kestenbaum, Rolling Stone, 17 Sep. 2022
  • Unlike Lang, Do is not an autodidact who rose from obscurity.
    — Tara Gonzalez, Harper's BAZAAR, 9 Sep. 2023
  • He is driven, inexhaustible, and an honest-to-goodness autodidact.
    — Devin Gordon, The Atlantic, 19 Aug. 2019
  • The eldest of eleven children, he was put to work at the age of thirteen and became an insatiable autodidact, reading deeply in philosophy.
    — Benjamin Kunkel, The New Yorker, 11 Mar. 2024
  • Like Hutchinson, Kempton rises to the rhetorical occasion, flush with the pride of the autodidact.
    — The New Yorker, 15 Apr. 2022
  • The second is Grace Hopper, an autodidact, teacher, and Navy rear admiral, among many other things.
    — Anna Wiener, The New Republic, 1 May 2018
  • Partly to compensate for his lack of a formal education, Somers is an obsessive autodidact.
    — Popular Mechanics, 14 Apr. 2023
  • Her father was an autodidact who invented a ribbon-tying device and invested in commercial real estate.
    — James R. Hagerty, WSJ, 17 Nov. 2022
  • The challenge for such an autodidact, then, is how to transcend the limits of personal experience when personal experience is the most reliable source of insight.
    — Daniel Rasmussen, WSJ, 5 Jan. 2023
  • Eric Thompson, who began working as a butcher’s apprentice at thirteen before finding his calling as an actor and a director, was an autodidact.
    — John Lahr, The New Yorker, 7 Nov. 2022
  • These are the citizen journalists, forum posters with statistics degrees, bloggers who work on Wall Street, and autodidact podcasters.
    — James McElroy, Washington Examiner, 4 Mar. 2021
  • Brand is a British actor, comedian, podcaster, autodidact, and all-around wonderful weirdo who is in recovery for his own multiple addictions.
    — Amy Dickinson, oregonlive, 22 Apr. 2020
  • Frederick Douglass became a towering intellect and journalist through his own efforts — an autodidact.
    — Armstrong Williams, Baltimore Sun, 12 May 2024
  • An autodidact like so many of the men who built the British Empire, Cautley arrived in India in 1819 as a humble artilleryman.
    — Tunku Varadarajan, WSJ, 4 Jan. 2019
  • Tanton was an autodidact and an irrepressible writer of memorandums; his personal library contained several thousand books.
    — Rachel Morris, New Yorker, 14 Nov. 2025
  • In 1825, British autodidact Benjamin Gompertz found the risk of death increases exponentially with age.
    — Carl Engelking, Discover Magazine, 29 Jan. 2018
  • Coe, an autodidact and the son of the outlaw-country musician David Allan Coe, relishes his role as scholar-enthusiast-gadfly, and his zeal is the show’s animating force.
    — Sarah Larson, The New Yorker, 13 Dec. 2021
  • But laws are slow to leave the books, and the Music & Amusement Association needed someone like Sharpe — an autodidact with no financial ties to the industry — to hasten the process.
    — Adam Ruben, Washington Post, 26 Mar. 2023
  • Today the Norwegian autodidact who reconfigured Western theater in the mid- and late 19th century appears at once larger than life and blurredly remote.
    — Brad Leithauser, WSJ, 17 May 2019
  • Unfortunately, d’Hérelle was an autodidact working as a volunteer at the Institut Pasteur, in Paris.
    — Nicola Twilley, The New Yorker, 14 Dec. 2020
  • Émigré scholars and nativist autodidacts met secretly in rural museums and published samizdat treatises filled with runic letters and outlandish ethnological hypotheses.
    — Jacob Mikanowski, Harper's magazine, 21 July 2019
  • Upon being elected mayor in 2006, Bogdán, who completed only three years of formal schooling but is a restless autodidact, set about helping villagers understand the power of that dictum.
    — Tibor Krausz, The Christian Science Monitor, 18 May 2017
  • Graham Hancock is an audacious autodidact who believes that long before ancient Mesopotamia, Babylonia and Egypt there existed an even more glorious civilization.
    — Michael Shermer, Scientific American, 1 June 2017
  • Graham Hancock is an audacious autodidact who believes that long before ancient Mesopotamia, Babylonia and Egypt there existed an even more glorious civilization.
    — Michael Shermer, Scientific American, 1 June 2017
  • Caldas, an autodidact, who early in his career built architectural models for Oscar Niemeyer, found success designing affordable furniture for the emerging Brazilian middle class.
    — Max Maeckler, Vogue, 18 Apr. 2019
  • Alejandro is a hyper-capable autodidact, a former anthropologist who enthusiastically spirals into obscure hobbies, like carving Elizabethan lutes or making portable pasteurizers for his wife to use on the family farm.
    — John Williams, New York Times, 10 July 2018

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'autodidact.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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