A person who excels at dinner-table conversation is a deipnosophist. The word, which appeared in English in the mid seventeenth century, was taken from the title of a third-century Greek work by Athenaeus that describes the erudite discussions that take place among a group of men as they partake of a banquet. Athenaeus created the term by combining the Greek deipnon, meaning dinner, with sophistes, meaning learned man. The latter word also exists in English as sophist, originally the name of esteemed Greek philosophers who would explain and argue issues in return for payment; eventually, however, sophist came to denote someone who used specious and tricky arguments to fool a listener. The name Sophia, meaning wisdom, derives from the same source.