appreciator

appreciate +‎ -or

appreciator (plural appreciators)

1. Someone who appreciates a given thing, especially:
   1. Someone who values something highly.
      • 1860, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life, Boston: Ticknor and Fields, “Culture,” p. 142,

        I find, too, that the chance for appreciation [of imaginative literature] is much increased by being the son of an appreciator, and that these boys who now grow up are caught not only years too late, but two or three births too late, to make the best scholars of.

      • 1993, Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy, New York: HarperCollins, 7.17, p. 448,

        […] I speak as an appreciator of not just the architecture but the way you have preserved its atmosphere,

   2. Someone who assesses or appraises the value of something.
      • 1779, William Thomson, Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa, London: J. Murray, 1782, Letter 47, p. 120,

        Let no chicaning intermediate agent but suffered to pass between the manufacturers and the Company’s warehouse-keepers and sorters, except the sworn appreciators and examiners, according to standard samples, secreted from the view, and from every possible communication with the owners.

      • 1794, Review of The Age of Infidelity, in The English Review, Volume 24, p. 124,

        that respectable collector and appreciator of religious evidence, Archdeacon Paley

      • 1919, W. N. P. Barbellion, The Journal of a Disappointed Man, London: Chatto & Windus, 4 March, 1915, p. 180,

        I like to keep myself well within the field of the microscope, and, with as much detachment as I can muster, to watch myself live, to report my observations of what I say, feel, think. In default of others, I am myself my own spectator and self-appreciator―critical, discerning, vigilant, fond!

      • 1940, Richard Wright, Native Son, New York: Harper and Row, 1966, Introduction, p. xxxi,

        Always, as I wrote, I was both reader and writer, both the conceiver of the action and the appreciator of it.