ABSTRACT
The term artisan is neither new nor uniform in time and place.1 According to an older, now obsolete definition, an artisan is 'one who practices or cultivates an art; an artist' {Oxford English Dictionary (OED) 1987). In modern definitions, an artisan, again according to the OED, is an individual 'employed in any of the industrial arts; a mechanic, handicraftsman, artificer'; for Webster's New Students Dictionary (WNSD) of 1964, he is a 'person (as a carpenter) trained to have manual dexterity or skill in a trade'; Longman's Dictionary of Contemporary English (1981), gives artisan as 'a skilled workman, especially in industry'. The differences among these contemporaneous definitions are not insignificant, and even the elements they have in common are not without qualifications. In the widest possible sense, they indicate a worker's association with some kind of skill as well as industry. However, to try to find common elements between the early sense of an artisan and the modern variants will prove all but impossible without going back to the root of the word. So the modern OED informs us that art is human skill as the result of knowledge and practice.
