Word of the Day

This is the kind of person I want to be!

From Doctor Dictionary's Word of the Day, February 14, 2005:

autodidact \aw-toh-DY-dakt\, noun:
One who is self-taught.

He is our ultimate autodidact, a man who made himself from
nothing into a lawyer, a legislator -- a president.
--Kevin Baker, "Log Cabin Values," [1]New York Times, April
2, 2000

Consider the autodidact in Sartre's Nausea, who is somewhat
unbelievably working his way alphabetically through an
entire library.
--James Wood, "Human, All Too Inhuman," [2]New Republic,
July 24, 2000

Buck's prose is a lot better than you'd expect from a
high-school dropout, but he turns out to be a reader and
autodidact.
--Jonathan Yardley, review of [3]North Star over My
Shoulder: A Flying Life, by Bob Buck, [4]Washington Post,
April 7, 2002
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Autodidact is from Greek autodidaktos, "self-taught," from
auto-, "self" + didaktos, "taught," from didaskein, "to
teach."