Daily AncestorCompositor
A compositor set type, picking metal letters from a type case and arranging them into lines and pages ready for printing.
Hand compositors stood at a slanted case, picked each letter, space and punctuation mark, and set them in a hand-held stick, reading upside down and backward. After printing the type was cleaned and put back.
From 1886 the Linotype machine, which cast whole lines of metal type from a keyboard, took over much of the newspaper work that compositors had done by hand.
As seen in a recordOccupation column of the 1850 to 1880 census
Jno. Ellis, 26, Compositor, Newspaper office
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Daily Ancestor. "Compositor." Dictionary of Old Record Words. https://dailyancestor.com/dictionary/occupations/compositor. Last checked 2026-10-01.