luminary
Other forms: luminaries
In scientific writing, Stephen J. Hawking is a luminary. People look up to this well-known scientist and author for his knowledge and insight.
Although luminary can mean an object or celestial body that gives off light, you'll often hear people talk about parties at which there were many luminaries in attendance. In this case, luminary means celebrity or well-known person in sports or politics, science or the arts. Think of them as being bright lights that make a party sparkle.
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a celebrity who is an inspiration to others“he was host to a large gathering of luminaries”synonyms: guiding light, leading light, notability, notable
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Vocabulary lists containing luminary
The top 1,000 vocabulary words have been carefully chosen to represent difficult but common words that appear in everyday academic and business writing. These words are also the most likely to appear on the SAT, ACT, GRE, and ToEFL. To create this list, we started with the words that give our users the most trouble and then ranked them by how frequently they appear in our corpus of billions of words from edited sources. If you only have time to study one list of words, this is the list.
Here's a bright idea: learn these words that contain the roots lum and luc, which come from the Latin word lux and lumen, meaning "light."