Rewriteman

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A newspaper reporter who crafts stories from information reported by others, such as legmen.

    "This was my abrupt introduction to the system by which most of the live news is handled for the New York evening newspapers [...] Its continued use has bred up two distinct and separate types of news-specialists—the leg man, who gets the story, but rarely writes it; and the rewrite man, who writes the story but rarely gets it."

Example

More examples

"This was my abrupt introduction to the system by which most of the live news is handled for the New York evening newspapers [...] Its continued use has bred up two distinct and separate types of news-specialists—the leg man, who gets the story, but rarely writes it; and the rewrite man, who writes the story but rarely gets it."

Etymology

From rewrite + -man.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.